Cheesy mysticism and an implausible love story make for mediocrity

Rating: 5/10 (24 December 2006)

Aronofsky's long awaited third feature is a bloated, ungainly, pretentious excursion to nowhere in particular. The film is billed as a love saga about the same two people (Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz), played out in three stories spanning 1,000 years  past, present and future. That's quite a laugh, since there's plenty of evidence that Jackman's character, Tom, is only capable of self love, pushing his agenda of violence, inattention to his wife, and bullish pursuit of his research, playing by his rules alone.
Tom's misbegotten roamings into time travel, parallel worlds and reincarnation are overwrought and largely incomprehensible, especially scenes from the future story in which Tom sits lotus style alongside a gnarly old tree, inside a giant bubble, floating around outer space among lurid animated montages, as if part of some New Agey detergent ad.
The proceedings in "Fountain" recall films like "The Illustrated Man" and Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." But those films at least were adapted from works by good storytellers: Ray Bradbury ("Man") and Arthur C. Clarke ("2001"). Unlike "Fountain," "Illustrated Man" is a convincing love story. "2001" iswell, I'll resist going off on that tangent for the moment. "Fountain" was written by Aronofsky and Ari Handel, and the screenplay is not well constructed. (A graphic comic book version, written by Aronofsky and illustrated by Kent Williams, was in fact spawned by the film.)
Why is it that otherwise sensible people can sometimes be so thoroughly bamboozled by the cheesy, showy varieties of mysticism served up in films like "Fountain?" We see this in the enduring cult adoration of Kubrick's film. More recently we saw it again in the acclaim given to "What the Bleep Do We Know?", a sophomoric infomercial for a religious cult up in Yelm, Washington. Are we simply curious about the paranormal? Or does our materialistic, overly politicized culture breed a hunger for the spiritual and mystical? Conversations with smart friends who fall for these puffed up films convinces me it is the latter.
Aronofsky's first film, "Pi" (1998), was brilliant: the taut, claustrophobic, plausible story of a mathematician's descent into delusion and paranoia. His second feature, "Requiem for a Dream," was messier. An aging woman gets addicted to diet pills trying to become more attractive, while her son and his girlfriend live a heroin junkie life together (in a fashion derivative to earlier, better works like "Drugstore Cowboy"). Aronofsky's definitely not proceeding in a desirable direction.
The best two things in "Fountain" are certainly not the principal actors, whose turns are undistinguished (though Aronofsky favorite Ellen Burstyn does a nice cameo as Tom's research supervisor). Nor is it the high tech, high cost animated montages making up the nebula in which Tom's detergent bubble floats about.
One good thing is a brief, stunning dance scene in one of the flash forwards to the future, when a dark figure makes slow movements against a starlit but otherwise blackened sky. The other is the pock marked, ferocious Mayan Chieftain in 1535 who looks and acts every inch an ancient bigshot. (In English & Maya) My grades: 5/10 (C) (Seen on 12/22/06)