Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Love
Over Time
(The Fountain, 12/18/06)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Darren
Aronofsky's films can't be confused with anybody else's. In both Pi
(1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) he revealed a sensibility
both cerebral and mystic, featuring big, primal dramas driven to crisis
by repetition and pounding musical cues. His latest, The Fountain,
represents more of the same but also something new—the courage
to be tender and, in the process, to look ridiculous.
What else can be said about a romance
so ambitious that transcends the millenia, with the intertwined souls
of "Tomas" (Hugh Jackman) and "Izzie" (Rachel Weisz)
meeting in different forms from 1500 AD through today to the year 2500?
First, Jackman is a Spanish conquistador, sent out by his besieged Queen
(Weisz) to recover the legendary Tree of Eternal Life from a hidden
Mayan temple. In the contemporary story, he's a brilliant research biologist
obsessed with finding a cure for the brain tumor afflicting his wise,
saintly wife (Weisz again). In the distant future, he's a Buddha-like
figure recumbent in a giant soapbubble (or is it a snowglobe? Or a terrarium?)
as it hurtles toward a dying star . . . and she is a tree.
Yes, a tree.
Actually, summarizing Aronofsky's
film this way does it as much disservice as, say, reducing Judeo-Christian
eschatology to three pithy sentences. What Aronofsky intends here is
a haunting meditation on love, loss, and acceptance. The three time
frames are not presented chronologically but intercut, with elements
of all cleverly reflected in each. His film comes to resemble most the
poetry of a very precocious 14 year-old who's been feasting on Carlos
Castaneda and Herman Hesse. That may sound like a putdown but is not
entirely meant to be, because during its better moments The Fountain
is honest, poignant, and refreshingly free of irony. Its theme of the
transfiguring power of death is a tonic in an age when life is confused
with "life-support." Those with a taste for outré
science fiction films like Solaris or Zardoz—or the
books of Castaneda and Campbell—are certainly its best audience.
The Fountain's tone has been
compared to the last baffling minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Excessive murkiness, however, is not the film's problem. Instead, it's
almost too clear, with its closed universe of repeating motifs (Spanish
inquisition = cancer; conquistador = crusading scientist) laid out like
a organs on an autopsy table. Though it eschews irony, the film could
have used some subtext to match its grand mystical pretensions.
Adding this performance to her role
in The Constant Gardener, it seems that Rachel Weisz is making
a career out of playing ethereal lovers existing only in flashback.
Jackman, to his credit, is more than game to make it all work—he's
equally plausible as the primitive man of action, the cloistered boffin,
or (as far as I'm equipped to judge) a space Buddha. His fate when he
finally discovers the fountain/tree is bizarre and memorable. But when
Aronofsky has him squat in deep space, bald as Marlon Brando's Kurtz,
shouting at his arborized lover, we do begin to wonder if someone has
prematurely let Aronofsky out of his own soapbubble.
©2006 Nicholas Nicastro
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