An unexpected lightness of being ...

Rating: 10/10 (26 November 2006)

I made a last second decision to see this film instead of the film I had scheduled for myself ("Flags of Our Fathers"), as its starting time afforded me extra time in the co-resident shopping mall to locate a present for my Sweety. I located the present I was seeking and found another, "The Fountain," which I also hope to share with Sweety before it leaves our theater market, likely as it is all too quickly to be replaced by a popular holiday blockbuster.
In short, the trailer I had seen on TV did not nearly do justice to this film. It showed what seems to be a superficial and fantastic tale, with wooden and emotionless dialog (sampling, as it does, some of the universally quieter pronouncements of its actors). And the sampled visuals make it seem almost like a sophisticated, but empty, CGI animation.
In reality, the film is a sublimely timeless, visual and aural poem, a meditation on life and death, and on human acceptance of both. It presents a three-part story, layered in both time and space across what appear to be several thousand years, beginning in the 15th century. As such, the three parts proceed as one, with a deft inter-cutting from one to another, not always in a consistent sequence, but in a sequence that reveals more and more about each part as the movie progresses.
The central tale passes circa the present day, where a research doctor (Hugh Jackman, as Tom Creo) is seeking a cure for cancer. His wife (Rachel Weisz, as Izzi Creo) is also ill, a major cause for Dr. Creo's urgent intensity. And the story unfolds in past, present, and future as both an epic reflection on the nature of good and evil, and the most fundamental struggle for meaning in mundane matters of life and death. The entire film is suffused with a powerful musical score from beginning to end, played almost entirely by the Kronos String Quartet, and which perfectly matches the visual poetry unfolding.
The principals appear in each part of time and space as different people on similar missions designed to solve their respective and timely problems of existence, yet, somehow, as the same people throughout, almost reincarnated. Jackman's Tomas/Tom/Tommy represents the single most consistent character, really the "I" of the multi-layered story. His character seems to answer the question posed by the trailer: what might it really mean for one to find the secret of eternal life? And the secret of the answer seems to lie in the reality of a universe in which death, paradoxically, is an integral part of eternal life.
The bigger questions, which might otherwise drift as if in a drug-induced haze, instead stand in a bold relief set off by the intensely emotional relationship between Tom and Izzi. Weisz's Izzi is as intense as Jackman's Tom, but she boils with a passion that is as precocious at finding final peace as is Tom's relentless seeking for eternal life. And the course of his and her struggle seems to nail the weight of these larger questions to some unseen cross, of which we glimpse only the slightest allusions. Ultimately, only the most necessary requirements for life survive to support the ultimate end, our own imagined, or rather Tom's, destiny. And, yes, love is also at both the beginning and the end.
All of the acting and cast is superb, and the roll of midwife to the birthing of both Tom's and Izzi's difficult destiny receives a splendid performance from Ellen Burstyn.
In sum, this movie comes the closest of any film I have seen to creating a contemporary cinematic mandala. If it works, and I think it does so nobly, it is, like a mandala, the symbol in which each of us finds something of our own reflected life, and that of the hopeful, yet deeply troubled, world around us.