'The Fountain' is something to which we can all relate

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2006)

When the movie started, I was somewhat afraid that it was going to turn into a highly stylized costume drama (from all three periods it represents) that would try to convey its messages. By the end, I was silenced into submission by an overwhelming silence and humility by the power of the experience. It's not the kind of movie you can really judge according to traditional paradigms of good, bad, funny, sad, etc. To me, it conveyed this overwhelming message about the interconnectivity of life and death, sorrow and happiness, meaning and emptiness, acting and passing... I hate to use simple binaries like those, but The Fountain seemed to tell me, among many things, that everything is okay, that everything is connected to everything else, and that in the end what we take from life is what we make of it. At first the three different stories (Counter-Reformation Spain, early 21st century America, and 22nd century infinity) don't relate to one another. Over time, we find that they become a part of one another, complements as such, that signify the larger contiguity of its constituent elements: life and death. There is no need to fear death because it leads to life: eternal in the beyond and regenerative on this earth. Even if there is no eternity, so what? We enjoy who and what we have while we have them as often as possible. When death occurs, that person may cease to function, but they never truly leave us. Their body decomposes into soil which grows into a tree or gets taken up by a bird and soars above the ground and lands elsewhere in the world. There is life everywhere, even in death. We fight so hard to hang on while all we have to do let it slide like sand, to release ourselves and others and flow through and beyond, together and forever, in one continuous stream of eternal energy. When I read my local paper's review for The Fountain this morning, I almost laughed when I saw the one star the Joe Schmoe reviewer gave it. Every other movie that came out today received no more than two stars anyway and none of the reviews were written by the paper's main movie critic. That tells you a lot about how seriously my city's newspaper takes itself. Anyway, The Fountain, for lack of a better adjective, was phenomenal, connotatively and denotatively. The film in and of itself was photographed in these golden, glossy textures that gave every shot a timeless aura, like it could have come from any period in time and still looked the same. Matthew Libatique is a truly exquisite cinematographic artist. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz had remarkable chemistry and brought Thomas and Izzi to transcendental planes of existence. I'm especially impressed with Jackman as he's really gone all out to show the world what he's got, not only in The Fountain, but also in The Prestige, X-Men 3, Scoop, Flushed Away, and even the goofy Happy Feet, all of which came out this year. The man is truly remarkable and if he doesn't get an Oscar nomination than no one should. Rachel Weisz is a true gem and shines like a million burning stars. I've liked her since her Mummy days. When I saw The Constant Gardener last year, I had a feeling the Best Supporting Oscar would be hers, and in The Fountain she goes even further, pulling us through time as the queen of Spain, Izzi, and the Tree of Life. Clint Mansell's music was chilling but soothing at the same time. There was a lot more of the Kronos Quartet in this film than in Aronofsky's last film, Requiem for a Dream. In fact, this movie on the whole was almost silent compared to Requiem's crescendoing frenzy of hallucinations, paranoia, hospital noises, and television static that drove the audience into the same traumatizing decline that each of its characters experienced. The Fountain is one of the quietest films I've ever seen (bar those that are silent). There is almost 100% continuity in the gentle humming of Mansell's music as the Kronos Quartet briskly links the disparate time periods seen throughout the film. Finally, Darren Aronofsky. That man has had a vision since Pi (1998) and The Fountain is a reflection on the evolution of his vision, style, and life experiences. While Requiem focused on youth, The Fountain focuses on maturity and death. While I still find Requiem to be as equally profound as The Fountain, there is something about the latter that the former lacks and I believe that is 'hope'. The Fountain tells us that even though we die, we will live again. Requiem told us that you only get so many chances in life before you reach the point of no return. Together, these films say more than I could ever hope to write about or convey to anyone. More than anything, Aronofsky's films are perceptual and metaphysical experiences (or phenomena if you will) that can only be seen and heard and felt in order to understand them. I can write about everything about every shot but that would do very little to you in terms of understanding The Fountain. I'd like to see it again, if not more, just to experience it again and gain a deeper insight into its multiple layers of meaning. Here's an infinite number of cheers for The Fountain, best picture of 2006 and beyond.