The Fountain: Of death and grief

Rating: 10/10 (11 April 2010)

In this film about learning to let go and accepting death, Aronofsky takes a highly unusual path in the visualization of the concepts, and succeeds in so many ways. Aronofsky took a simple story about a man and his dying wife and made us feel the weight of its significance in the grieving man. The woman he loved represented for him, life, but this convergence took him away from reality, and distanced him from his wife during her dying days, both physically and mentally, and the film shows him realizing this among other things as he sorts through his feelings about her death. Aronofsky shows that he can deal with the affirmation of life as well as he has with urban death in Requiem for a Dream.
The film is divided into three story lines about a Spanish conquistador, a present-day man whose wife is dying, and a man in a futuristic bubble traveling through space. The film is grounded in the present-day story; the other two are metaphoric representations. The first storyline is a visualization of the manuscript that the wife wrote about a conquistador, representative of a role the husband fashioned for himself to try to save his wife, attempting to save a Spanish queen, a shadow of his beloved wife coupled with his sense of duty to serve her. She leaves the unwritten ending to be finished by her husband, and he struggles to do so, but at the end, he realizes that the character of the conquistador must die alone, as it was the part of him that lived only to save his beloved.
Grief is a journey, one metaphorically represented by the man's travel toward the dying star through the golden nebula in a bubble. He travels with the dying tree of life, a representation of his feelings and memories about his dead wife. He sustains himself by consuming the dying tree of life, piece by piece. Only by killing his grief, trapped with the feelings about his wife, can he actually be born anew and rendered able to live.
The present-day story is mainly composed of him recalling the memories of his wife's last days. In it, a curious element stands out: the magical elixir from Central America that cures the macaque. Does this make this work a science fiction? For me, it's a reinforcement of the concept that this movie itself is a vision. Perhaps this distances the film away from reality, but it really works here, because the three storytelling elements merge so seamlessly together, due to this fantastic element at even the movie's most grounded level. Is it a warped memory, or even a hopeful fantasy of the grieving husband? Whatever the case, the grief, the guilt, and the obsession over the loss of a loved one come through in abundance.
Beyond the basics of the ingenious narrative that allows for a deep plunge beyond empathy, the film brings other layers of understanding and subjects to chew on long after you've finished watching. Some of the most enjoyable for me were the religious metaphors. Christian, Mayan, Buddhist imageries are presented throughout the film. All of these religious beliefs, and perhaps most if not all of the world's religions, deal with birth, death, and rebirth. The concept of rebirth is different for each, but death brings life, including in Christianity, where Christ's death cleanses the original sin and invites humans back to life beyond death. As is such, the conquistador and the man in the bubble had to die, so that the man can live on. Also in our lives, we constantly go through a process of death and rebirth as we grow older, and the film represents through a grieving process these cycles that mirror that of life and nature itself.
Touching back on the narrative, our traditional sense of time is useless here. The three stories are not real, even in a fictional sense; rather they are memories and metaphors. The only scene that occurs in real time may be the one where the man buries the tree seed near the end (within fiction, of course). The film may be, in a fictional time, taking place in a few minutes, or in an hour and a half, rather than days or centuries. For all of us, our memories and thoughts of things past exist in timeless space among connectors between neurons, where we can revisit large spans of time in merely seconds, and recall the feelings from those times with force and clarity. The film is an expression of such concept of time, and the expansion of the collapsed sense of time we feel in our memories.
The film's sense of morality is also quite unusual. The history of the conquistadors is that of exploitation and brutality in the name of religion and state, and it loosely parallels the film's concept of science in the thoughtless use of animals for the conceits of mankind. It points to the moral ambiguities that can be spurred on by our resistance to the cycles of life and death. I don't think the movie is anti-science, but rather prompts us to think about our role within the natural order.
The film is shot beautifully as well, adding to its amazing depth. The disassociated feel of the conquistador and the floating bubble story lines is a reflection of the man's inability to deal with reality. In both of these visions, the woman is hardly seen, although her presence is always felt in connection to his obsession over cheating death--she is obscured in the earlier storyline, and exist only in ghostly bits of memory in the latter. In contrast, the husband's recalling of the present-day memories feels incredibly tactile--the close up shots of the pair's intimate moments during their heartfelt interactions reveals itself as the closest reflection of reality. Of course, the excellent and compelling music thread these elements together.