The Fountain

Posted by Loukas Tsouknidas (loukas@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 18, 2007

Something like eight years ago during the yearly Thessaloniki Film Festival, I remember sitting on the stairs of a crammed theater where people were lined up past the front row, laying on their backs with their jackets as pillows. All this fuss, just to watch the extra third screening of that movie “Pi” by a young American director named Darren Aronofsky. We all enjoyed it and when Aronofsky came in to talk about it he couldn’t believe his eyes. People laying on the floor as close to the screen as it probably gets just for him? We loved him too, he was modest and seemed promising as a probable visionary. Cinephiles are always looking for the next auteur anyway.

After “Requiem” he was established. It was time to move his vision forward: “The Fountain”, a tale of love and fear of loss told in three different times; accelerating for a fan to say the least. The time has come and i finally saw Aronofsky’s great comeback. Disappointment is a kind word to describe it.

Tom is a surgeon involved in a research to find a cure for cancer. Izzy is his beloved wife who unfortunately has it. As it accelerates Tom is struggling to beat death in the race for Izzy. In the meantime in the old Spain, Queen Isabel (who looks exactly like Izzy) sends Tomas (meaning Tom) to the new world to find the Tree of Life and gain immortality for her. That’s also the storyline of a book Izzy leaves undone as she loses the battle. Adding up to all this, a giant bubble is traveling through space (obviously in future time). In it, lies a meditating bald Tom Creo (AKA Tom AKA Tomas) who tries to save a tree and frequently gets memories of Izzy. Those are the three interweaving storylines that feature the same protagonists.

Aronofsky began this project in 2002 but lost significant funding on the way along with two stars, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchet. He managed to cut the budget down and came up with these 97 minutes of schematic, new age mumbo jumbo over the timelessness of love or the futile fight against death or whatever.

There are two underscripted stories where people talk pompously about everything, real characters are non-existent, just an over dramatic portrait of man in love (with his wife or his quest?) who seeks the impossible (for himself or his wife?). Plus a non-scripted story about a bald guy who lives in a bubble and meditates. We’ re lucky he’s not listening to Yanni i guess. Nevertheless the music is annoyingly imposing trying hard to suggest the obvious.

Aronofsky’s persistence to leave cgi out of his visuals seems like a way to lure cinephile intellectual Luddites into loving them. They are fairly good but not connected from storyline to storyline.

I saw a Hou Hsiao-hsien movie last year called “Three Times”. Three love stories with the same protagonists in three different eras. I was bored, but i could see the cinematic work and the vision behind it. “The Fountain” wasn’t just boring but totally superficial also.

Read more articles by Loukas Tsouknidas