The Great Duality Squeezed through a Post-Modern Cake Decorating Kit

Rating: 8/10 (5 July 2007)

The Fountain offers a variety of perspectives on life and death which ring true partly because, like most great spiritual beliefs, they express no specifics nor do they exhaustively explain themselves. In fact, just like many systems of belief that incorporate the notion of spirits and other profoundly affective/effective works of art, the film remains plausible by steadfastly refusing to make perfect and consistent sense in any but an aesthetic and 'gut' manner. Its ambiguity allows you to insert your own personal gods and demons wherever you wish so that you can end up saying that you both "agree with" and "understand" it.
Having said all of this - the film resonates strongly with my own beliefs (it will not do so with everybody), and expresses many things which I find attractive. The film can be interpreted as a piece of hardcore areligious psychological rationalism, and a simultaneous and completely complementary celebration of the infinite cycle of life springing from death and visa versa. The Fountain succeeds as a spiritual messenger incorporating ideas from a variety of religious sources (most profoundly Native American concepts) and also achieves the believability of good science fiction film because it carefully ties the parallels between the spiritual (the action of Izzy's book and Tommy's final chapter) and the real (Izzy's death and Tommy's denial about its inevitability).
There are essentially two plots, which appear, given the Slaughterhouse-5-like approach to chronology, to be several plots early in the film. The future and the past turn out to be components of a book being written by a surgeon's dying wife and completed by him after her death. The surgeon, from whose perspective we experience the story, must finish the story - a gift from his beloved to allow him to discorporate some of the demons regarding their relationship by formalizing the grieving process through creative expression (Our hero, Tommy is pretty intensely wound up throughout most of the film, and it is obvious that his road to enlightenment will not be the smoothest or straightest one around).
The plots are as follows:
The Real - sci-fi story about a brilliant surgeon who is trying to invent a cure for death - inspired by his dying wife. This plot is appropriately intense, and not very merciful.
The Spiritual/Fantastic - the same individual and his wife playing characters in her novel about a conquistador trying to find the fountain of youth and the tree of life, who later becomes an astronaut willing to sacrifice himself for the rebirth of the universe.
All the while, Tommy (Jackman) is beginning to come to grips with his own mortality.
Both plots are very carefully thought-out, nicely visualized, and well performed. The connections between them are very nicely paralleled through the narrative, and yet the film does not hold its audience's hands as it wanders through unfamiliar territory, but rather challenges its participants to interpret. The only problem I had with the intertwined story-lines is that the 'real' story was overpopulated with over-dramatic moments, unlikely somewhat forced coincidences and occasional visual and script clichés. The characterizations are all particularly good, and some (particularly Weisz, Jackman and Burstyn) will definitely stick with you after you've seen the film. However, the hyperbolic drama of the 'real' story sometimes makes the lead characters appear to over-act.
Visually, the film is an absolute treat, and although it tries to sell itself as an independent art piece, the $35+ million dollar budget shows - in a tasteful and sensually powerful way. The use of sound is nothing special, but doesn't detract from the entertainment value or the ideas. The camera-work is generally good, but I felt that there were perhaps too many gratuitous crying scenes shot with extreme close-ups.
Darren Aronofsky has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in mainstream, commercial, artistic film making. I look forward to his on-going growth as a director with enthusiasm.