Death: A Rebirth

Rating: 7/10 (3 December 2006)

Familiar of course with Pi and Requiem For A Dream, I knew that when I saw The Fountain I would be taken aback by the inventiveness and talent in the film-making itself, and I was. It has very progressive and interesting cinematography, with lots of gold in the theme of the lighting, which movies rarely have and this happens to have in nearly every seen. The editing was, as in Requiem, intensely complex, infusing the sharp images of reality as we know it with abstract sequences involving the Tree of Life and the nebula that surrounds it. The musical score gives the film such drama and emotional drive, even if it's only a hint of the power that it had in Requiem. The story, however, could just be either something way ahead of its time or way ahead of itself.
The Fountain is a movie that cannot explain itself, so it's created in a way relative to an impressionist painting. You'll find that you're asking yourself questions about the story, like stories by their very nature provoke you to do, but they tend to be qusetions that you feel you've either missed the answer to or don't quite understand the answer to. I'm not panning the film for its intricacy. It's very possible that it has a profound point at the doorstep of the answers to all of the questions you'll find yourself asking yourself about the story. And it does provoke thought. For instance, the tagline for the movie is, "What if you could live forever?" During it, you surprisingly end up seriously asking yourself that. What if you could? What would you do? But the film requires such concentration and patience and the subsequent pondering after seeing it, and after several "avant-garde" and "post-modernist" and "neo-realist" filmmakers have opened so many brain-rattling discussions over so many films that they strategically claim later to have meant basically nothing so that they could look down on their audience as patsies, the victims of their time and age, I grow suspicious when a film is so cryptic that by the end, the plot hasn't even entirely revealed itself at face value yet.
As for Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, the two leads that replaced Brad Pitt and Jennifer Connelly, are very impressive, Jackman being one of the great cryers of recent cinema and Weisz being so evasively good at absorbing your sympathy. Burstyn is wasted, her character a token.