Five stars, but I can't recommend it.

Rating: 9/10 (6 December 2006)

More films should be written like this.
Darren Aronofsky, though still young, as filmmaker go, has crafted another exemplar of what can be achieved in visual story-telling. Unlike the other films of this period, ones that focus on marketability, star-power, and sheer impact, this film seeks to achieve what film was meant to.
Since the first of the Lumiere films, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and the Wizard of Oz, film has been the medium of a story-telling that provides a shared audio-visual experience that be found nowhere else. The Fountain achieves this. It is a spectacle of the interwoven lifetimes of Tomas and Isabella (Izzy). From the fall of Andalusian Spain under the weight of the Inquisition, to turn of the millennium American medical research, to an undated "future" recounting the lives past. It is the search for life, the reality of death, and the relationship between them.
I don't often grant 10 of 10 ratings to films. This film is truly exceptional. However, I do NOT feel that I can recommend it to anyone. This is not the type of film to be recommended. Similarly, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams or Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut; either you'll get it or you won't, either you'll love it or hate it.
For a little background, I recommend the following for perspective: Genesis 3:24 from the Bible; the misnomered "Dark Ages" of Europe wherein is Islamic empire crossed the strait of Gibraltar and peacefully ruled Southern Europe between ~790 and ~1497; Isabella, Queen of Spain; al-Andalus; The Spanish Inquisition, which essentially erased 700 years of European history; the Conquest of South America; old growth trees in the Amazon basin and resource exploitation by everyone from the colonial Spainiards to contemporary pharmaceutical companies; Yggdrasil and the Tree of Life.
Demand that more films be made this way.