Tweet

Release Date: November 22nd, 2006

Let me shoot straight with you. I wasn’t planning on seeing The Fountain. I turned down several invitations to go see it. I wasn’t interested. It didn’t look like my kind of movie and I don’t like Darren Aronofsky. In fact, I may even dislike his work. But a promise is a promise and after, for some reason, agreeing to see this movie I went on an early Sunday evening. The theater had about 15 people in it, so good sign. Not.

But anyway, I opened up my mind to it. Wanted to give it a chance. And the result? Did I hate it? Do I loathe it? Could it be love? Nope. None of the above. I didn’t like it but I didn’t hate it. I didn’t feel cheated or rewarded by it. I felt unfulfilled. That’s the easiest way of describing how I feel about it.

Some of it was nice. The cinematography is mostly nice, though heavy handed at times. They say they avoided using CGI, though there are many effects shots that are clearly “computer-aided” that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I really don’t know what to say about it. Hugh Jackman does pretty well. He still tends to play a bit over the top, but he showed he has range that he can further develop. Rachel Weisz is like a wave function in this. At times, marvelous, at other times very bland.

The directing is typical Aronofsky, more inline with Pi than with Requiem for a Dream, although you see hits of it. His over-abundance of extreme close ups. He still hasn’t shaken the feeling that he is just a really fantastic grad student at USC.

So the plot. Well. There are three stories going on. Wait, hold on, wrong. There is one story. Told three ways in three times. Sort of. Ah hell. Hugh Jackman plays characters named some version of Thomas and Weisz is Izzi/Isabel. In all three stories, Weisz is dying in some way and Jackman is searching obsessively for the cure in some way. Be it as a Conquistador looking for the Tree of Life or a doctor for a cure for brain tumors or a weirdo bald guy intent on crashing his bubble-tree thing into a star so that they can both be reborn, but don’t forget that this tree is actually…

Well. I won’t spoil it. It’s weird. It doesn’t make a helluva lot of sense and when it’s all said and done, not much has been done or said. Skip this in theater. Maybe rent it if you’re really interested. Like I said, it does look nice.

I also have no doubt that if you were pleasantly drunk or high and weren’t trying to follow the story, it would probably be really amazing. But overall it doesn’t over much. It wants to be some grand statement on death and life, fate and acceptance, but it’s not. It’s 60 minutes of footage edited out to 91 minutes of “movie” with 6 minutes of actual story.

It could have been good. There were solid ideas here. Just handled wrong. It feels empty.

Final Grade: C

On the Upside: It looks nice, Jackman stretches his acting chops, Weisz flares up and shines at times.

On the Downside: The plot. The execution of the plot. Weisz’s downturns. The plot.

On the Side: This idea has been on the shelf for a long time and probably should have been left there, although an early draft was turned into a graphic novel.

RUMOR MILL: Interesting note. I’m not a huge fan of Aronofsky as you can tell (but I do enjoy Requiem quite a bit) and there is another director, Eric Forsberg, who I am not a fan of and who has taken issue with my review of his movie, Night of the Leben Tod. I’m like 98% sure I saw him at the movie theater and I’m 75% sure he was seeing The Fountain. Small world. Anywho, I’m sure he loved it.

Yours in a weirdo space bubble,

Robert “the tree of spite” Fure