Beautiful and Sensible

Rating: 8/10 (19 May 2007)

So some of you hate it. That's understandable...it's slow and it's obscure, and a bit ponderous.
But it is perfectly comprehensible, I assure you. There was no point in the film where I found myself more than a little bit lost. And the resonances between the three stories and the themes and refrains were quite plain to see.
Izzy has written a book: about a Queen (herself), being surrounded by an evil Inquisitor (cancer). She deputizes the Conquistador (Tommy) to find the key to eternal life. It doesn't make 100% sense for the Queen to do so...you'd figure she'd prefer to have the Conquistador spirit her out of the country. The fact that she *doesn't* should alert you to the fact that she can't leave, because she's Izzy and she's stuck in her body.
In the present, Tommy cannot let her go. He works like a dog to try and save her. He's traveling down a dark and narrow road. You see this echoed throughout all three story lines, which feature linear, sparsely lit environments (this was pointed out in the featurette) -- code for his difficult path and his monomania, code for his journey to the light.
Since he discovered this fountain of youth drug as a serendipitous accident while searching for the cure to Izzy's cancer, the future Baldie could be (with his ring tattoo) Tommy himself -- but it's better understood metaphorically, which is how Aronofsky presents it. The tree, the tree of life, the same magical tree which cured the monkey and which the Conquistador sought, is Izzy -- Tommy feeds himself off the tree, ensuring his continued eternal life, just as he fed off Izzy herself, which indicates he feared simply the extinction of his own heart when she died. That Izzy is the tree suggests he felt Izzy rendered him immortal, and we all, who have loved, have understood that feeling of immortality.
In the end, Tommy, in "First Father" mode, sacrifices his body for the creation of a new universe -- both in the dissolution into vegetable matter, and in the disintegration by the supernova -- which is seen as the final letting go of Izzy and of his pain.
Beyond this for me it gets a little fuzzy, for I only saw it a few days ago and still processing it. But as a writer of symbolic weirdness myself I know when something is comprehensible and when it's just weirdness for its own sake. This is the former, not the latter. And you can be angry and feel cheated because you didn't get it, but you can't say there's nothing to get. Aronofsky clearly worked to provide a well-realized and resonant narrative which is actually more integrated and finished than Pi and deeper and more authentically personal than Requiem.