A Critique of The Fountain

Rating: 10/10 (29 November 2006)

WARNING: Interpretations of the film = SPOILERS!
As a work of pure individual vision, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is the epitome of ambitious conviction. The film is a meditation on our susceptibility to humanistic inclinations pertaining to the preservation of life and the sustenance of youth. Figurative juxtaposition, as conceived through three non-discrete time periods, punctuate persistent symbolism, as presented through a central image; the tree of life. The story is of Man's requisite to defeat mortality. Love is the connective fiber that binds past, present, and future monologues together to ultimately form a harmonious expression.
The Fountain is superb philosophy decisively because of its posing questions concerning our perception of reality, the communication of learned gestures impulsive to stimulus, and the nature of human existence. Actor Hugh Jackman delivers his performance with a raw intensity rarely demonstrated through the film medium. He assumes the roles of a 16th Century conquistador stalking the fountain of youth on behalf of the Spanish queen, a 21st Century research scientist flustering in heated anguish in a race against his wife's cancer, and an astronaut in a transcendent voyage to a nebula wrapped around a dying star.
Director Darren Aronofsky masterfully overlaps symbols throughout the duration of the picture in relation to the fountain of youth. The unbroken circles represented in several variations symbolize perfect natural design, and flirts with the concept of reincarnation. In critiquing the inevitability of death, the protagonist's conclusive encounter with eternity abandons the literal for the metaphoric. The future monologue transcends the metaphysical as the visual representation of the principal character's final destination in conformity to the laws of the circle of life.
There are immaculate moments of sublimity that leave you with a feeling of inscrutable well-being. A tangible sense of love transcends beyond the living that surpasses our ability to completely articulate. Love is the quagmire impeding our progress towards revolving full circle. It's Man's thirst for knowledge leading to the denial of our right to literal immortality that is ultimately the most fascinating. The Fountain neither makes an attempt to solve the intellectual mysteries of life, nor devolves into the conventions characteristic of an exploitive genre piece.
The Fountain is an emotionally devastating survey of loss and grief that takes you inside the mind of its protagonist, and it's the definitive example of where cinema should be taken more often.