Rating: 
Its official: 2006 has been a very good year. A groundswell of visionary works have emerged this year like a minor earthquake reconstituting the territory of my somewhat dormant aesthetic tastes. I cannot account for this shift, whether I have become different in some way, less cynical maybe, or whether it is something in the water in America that is making so many of their filmmakers raise the bar of cinema as they have. The year began triumphant with Terrence Malick’s masterpiece, ‘The New World’, and not three months ago Todd Field’s ‘Little Children’ had me hurling hyperboles of the second coming. Now there is yet another film to add to the mantle: Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Fountain’. My cup truly runneth over.
First let me say that while I have always liked Aronofsky’s prior work I have never fully loved it. For some reason I tend to lump him with Christopher Nolan, perhaps because they arrived on the scene around the same time as first time directors both with their signature styles. I consider Nolan to be a master storyteller, and with Aronofsky this trait was a bit wanton, he remained more of a master stylist in need of something to say. By my estimation, Aronofsky stood in the shadows of Nolan as a solid enough filmmaker but not much of a heavyweight. Maybe after a few more prize fights he would show his stuff, he was certainly a director to remember and look out for.
Much has preceded the premiere of ‘The Fountain’, not least of all the expectation of Aronofsky raising his game. Pre-production rumors of the epic scale and big budget price tag of his next feature had everyone in Hollywood wagging their tongues, and when Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett signed on and subsequently signed off, it provided further fuel to the fire. Then the trailer came out and it became readily apparent that this was not a half-measure affair. The story weaves through 16th century Spain to modern day to 26th century outer space, laden with philosophical musings taken from Mayan and Christian mythologies upon the meaning of life, love and death. Not since Stanley Kubrick has a director attempted such an expansive scope to tell a story of such philosophic depth, it would seem either he was going to hit the mark or fall far and fast in the face of ridicule. The later seemed to be the verdict for the film, as its Cannes premiere was received with the now somewhat commonplace act of booing. I admit that I lost hope for the film after reading some of the reviews from Cannes. It was a bold film to make and I had suspicions that the director of ‘Requiem for a Dream’ was still too young, and too early in his career to do proper justice to the gravitas of the story. When ‘The Fountain’ came to the Toronto International Film Festival there was a sentiment among festival goers that it was not as bad as Cannes made it out to be. This was followed by some out and out praise for the film, not least of all by one of the film critics I most admire, Matt at BlogTO. Of course I would have to see it for myself and last night I did just that.
From the initial press coming out of Cannes I expected to see some sign of overt pretense or unearned pathos, wringing of hands or sloppy philosophy, and there was none of that, I repeat, none. I am completely baffled by the Cannes response. The emperor is fully clothed and majestically so. The only thing I can think of that may have inspired the ire of the crowd is that Aronofsky did not connect the dots for them in the unraveling of the story, and that it is less narrative-driven so much as it is a poetic rumination on great existential questions. As corny as it may sound, this is a film you have to experience with your heart, you need come to it as you would a lover’s poem, with raptured attention. Like a poem it is fraught with images and ideas semantically gleaned from your lived experience, a poem that seems like a jumble of words to the purely analytical, to those rendering meaning from some outside rubric, but to those who know what it is to nestle into bed with the woman you love with a trepidation that one day this person will be taken from you, the wrought emotion is earned, and the artistic license the director takes is just. The feelings being expressed are bigger than the everyday and require the canvas Aronofsky has employed, and he excels beyond my wildest imagination at giving such an abstract merging of worlds and mythologies a real beating heart. This is not an easy thing to pull off and nothing in this film feels easily put together or haphazardly applied, there is a real affection behind this work which permeates every crevice onscreen. It feels like a true auteur work, the embodiment of one person’s vision, something quite rare in cinema.
At the center of the film is a story of enduring love traversing a thousand years, a love story brought to life by the indelible gifts of Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman. Until this film and ‘The Prestige’ I was largely in the dark with regards to Hugh Jackman’s popularity but I have seen the light, and without him as the amorphous crusader I am not sure if the film would be quite as effective; likewise, if Rachel Weisz were replaced by another actress (even one such as Cate) something would be amiss, she has an aura about her that makes me understand what is at stake in this conquest for eternal life. Together their chemistry is the glue that keeps this ambitious film together as Aronofsky’s sepia-toned visuals and Clint Mansell’s quivering score keep the momentum going.
The Fountain is a gorgeous film and a deeply affecting meditative experience. People have probably made comparisons between this and ‘Solaris’, either in praise or derision. I see it as ‘Solaris’ done right. It may be Tarkovsky-lite, but I consider that a good thing. Aronofsky went all in and it paid off.
For interpretations of the film I direct you to the spoiler-ridden comment section, where I and others have come up with some potential readings.
I think this song is appropriate so I wanted to add it here, as my addition to the soundtrack:
Tim Buckley – Once I Was
And of course the trailer:
12 Comments
I am glad you saw this fim nd led it!
I am especially bafled that the thingwas paned at Cnnes, of all places – Europeans are not the sort you’d think need their hands held and their plots to be obvious. I mean Cacheeeee fard phenomenally over there…
If he hadn’t done Requiem, I’d have no problem characterizing Aronofsky as the actions/gestures counterpart to Linklater’s torrents of words.
I was moved and devastated by the brilliance of this movie, but, thinking back on it, I’m not really so sure what I took from it, brainwise (but maybe this is part of the movie’s objective), but this is absolutely in that limited class of movies where I feel what the director/cast/crew wanted to convey, and the benevolence of that justifies the intellectual bits I don’t “get” yet.
I let the film wash over me without too much thinking and enjoyed it on that level. I really felt the pathos, it is incredibly poignant, the images of this guy and a tree floating through space pining for a long dead love. Aronofsky handles every aspect of the film perfectly.
In retrospect I have sort of pieced together some ideas about the ending… so consider the following spoilers…
The way I see eternity, it includes both eternal happiness and eternal sadness, that those moments when he is truly at peace and in love he can live inside that moment for eternity. It is hard to fathom, but hey, we are talking about eternity! anyways, near the end he chooses a different path in the story of his life, he follows isabel outside rather than going to surgery… this tangent can be thought of as one of the infinite choices to be made in eternity. This tangent ends with Isabel handing him a cone (?) and we later see him placing the dead cone on her grave. Now I see this as being an allusion to isabel’s speech about the mayan guy having a tree sprout out of his grave, the metaphor for eternal life. If one is to take these things literally, the tree that grows from isabel’s grave is the union of her and him (for I also think that cone could signify the conquistador turning into vegetation prior). When he is in outer space, the life that is the tree is their union. Being outside of time can allow one to live side by side with another time, which the tree represents. It is a really beautiful image when you think about it.
That is about all I have pieced together so far, again, I don’t think it need be terribly literal. It is a lot of life begetting death begetting life eternity… it is the sublime experince of feeling it evokes that I think is most important
further SPOILERS:
In response to Triflic’s intriguing interpretation that the 16th century storyline is not a direct part of the eternal love story but rather indirectly the dramatization of Isabel’s book which provides the mythology… see it here http://twitchfilm.net/forum/index.php?topic=1506.msg12939#msg12939
let me try and restate my view
everything in the film is positioned within the eternal pov. It is a hard thing to comprehend but lets say the conquistador story is the point where the fountain of eternal life is obtained. The justification for saying that what preceded that moment is part of the eternal too is that it is nonsensical to speak of something situated outside the eternal, he was not finite until 35 and then part of the infinite thereafter, the moment of conception is something of a fiction once the eternal is realized. The ego is subsumed within the eternal, what was once linear ceases to have any real property of linearity, the ‘finite’ events leading up to the discovery of the tree of life reveal themselves to be infinite.
In the same way there is no linearity to how Aronofsky positions the story, though outside of the eternal pov we the audience may hope for some tangibility that way. This is to say that within the manifold of eternity Aronofsky constructs a loose narrative that expresses the sublime power of the eternity and love through an artistic arrangement of possible tangents, none of them definitive.
Excluding all other eventualities that could and would occur in an infinite amount of time, what we are left with is segments which can be folded onto one another for the purposes of Aronofsky’s sublime poem.
These folds tell a story of the cycle of life, the conquistador finding eternity by becoming quite literally subsumed by nature, made into vegetation that I suspect is carried over in the cone Isabel offers Tom. This is a strange fold because Tom is a parallel reconfigurement of the conquistador (or if we need to for our sanity think linear, Tom is the rebirth of that essence from the 16th century) now holding a remnant of that conquistador. Isabel, once the Queen in the 16th century is herself recycled and providing the motivation for the next germination of life from death, namely the planting of the cone atop her grave (a notion she inspired Tom to do) which, from the folding Aronofsky employs we can presume manifests into the space tree, a living union… which exists in tandem to another parallel reconfigurement, the future Tom, who exists outside of the living tree, and which for some unexplained reason is taking it to a dying star.
This space Tom behaves in Aronofsky’s poem as the fixed version from which the present day memories/parallel realities manifest (an attribute which is an artistic convention not a qualitative account of eternity). He serves as the isolated, eternally anguished version which exists outside of the union that the tree symbolizes. Something separates him from that union, and I think his ambition to take the tree to the dying star is that together they may be annihilated and reconfigured thus starting a new union. If I remember right the final images in the film are of amorphous shapes coming apart and go back together, and that is sort of what is going on in this description of events.
This is fun. You handle the metaphor, I’ll take the Literal.
Conversation continued in the Twitch Forum.
http://twitchfilm.net/forum/index.php?topic=1506.msg12939#msg12939
Strangely enough, Mike, that could almost apply to another ‘immortal – reunion’ story, from the Chinese-Finland co-production, JADE WARRIOR, which is loosely constructed from Finnish poetry, the Kalevala.
But I’m going to go the literal route on this one. There are certainly echos of the poetic – something which is nearly impossible not to do when considering the construct of ‘eternal love’...isn’t that the raison d’etre of poetry? Love of something – Spiritual, Country, Person.
To Continue…
The ‘space orb’ segments of the film are Tommy who is now about 535 years old. He is kept alive by his discovery of the literal Mayan tree of life (in present day Guatamala). He is now taking the tree containing the essence of Izzy to Xibalba (“In the heavens, the Road to Xibalba was represented by the dark rift visible in the Milky Way.” – Wikipedia). Still continuing his futile effort to ‘save izzy’ when in reality he should be with her. You could actually interpret this from Izzy’s 16th century story, where the queen foolishly sends her conquistador away, when Spain’s time is limited, instead of relishing in his company, something she wants to communicate to Tommy who is spending too much time trying to save Izzy and not actually enjoy the remaining time they have left. Back to the ‘orb’ – I may be stretching this a bit far, but my guess was his intent to reach Xibalba and reunite the part of Izzy in the Tree with the remainder, presumably to make her whole again so he could join her in some sense of completeness.
Of course the magic of the movie is the failure which teaches the central premise that one should appreciate what they’ve got while they’ve got it, and mortality makes that all the more precious. I’m pretty sure the central thesis of the film is clearly articulated with Ellen Burstyn’s character. The Izzy story shows the love of Isobel and Tomas as sort of a loyalty thing not an intimate thing, not the burning love shown in the 21st century and 26th century threads. I loved the tree springing from Tomas sequence, but I cannot recall if that scene is positioned at the point before Tommy was to complete the story, or after…so I’m really unable to continue this line of thinking until I see the film again (It’s been a few months since I saw it!—- And it is nice to actually be able to chat with someone about the film!!)
The cause of my confusion of the response from the film from critics: if anything, the message is beaten over the viewers head and is not obtuse at all. People may get caught up (especially after Babel, 21 grams, Memento, Primer) in sorting the pieces together in some meaningful way (which I believe is not a stretch via my explanations above), but the movie is quite simple really, told very visually and yet still emotionally powerful – To me anyway.
Heh. and I was not drunk when I wrote my first post. My keyboard is acting horrible lately. The bit with Cacheeeee, I meant that Cache fared well over there wihout any narrative handholding.
Looking forward to catching up on the debate tomorrow at lunch.
I don’t see why the three sections (Historical/Present/Future) can’t just be three different tenses of the same expression, with the conquistador’s activities growing increasingly refined and abstract as the tenses advance into the future, until, in the dying star, his efforts are distilled into a series of rituals that echo the actual activities of the previous ages.
So if you look at the film as either a spiral or a series of three circles, the smallest circle, or the spiral that gets closest to enlightenment is the future thread in the dying star. The other layers are like past attempts at the same gesture. I don’t think (this is where I digress from your theory, Rot) that the three threads are literally made to tie in together – that some element from the conquistador’s story literally affects the present day Tom, or the future abstract Tom in the star. But I like, immensely, the concept of the infinite possibilities for folding segments of time.
Still noshing this over. I feel very fortunate, reading on the thread, to have been one of only 2 people sitting at opposite ends of the theater in a super-discount morning matinee on thanksgiving Day. No cellphone bastards distracting me, thank god!
(Casino Royale, by the way, was freaking fun!)
The tree springing from Tomas is very late in the film, and I cannot remember either if it is something specifically read by Tom, or something added on in the final dizzying finale.
If this is literal I do not see how Izzy gets to live inside the tree, surely the cone had to have been directly a part of the tree of life, in which case I do not see how the 16th century narrative strand was fictional.
Xibalba was designated by the Mayans as their home of the dead, perhaps it was the aspiration of this Tom to not bring Izzy back to life, but to find some kind of end to his torment, or even a potential union with Izzy through the simultaneous conception/destruction caused by entering Xibalba. If I was living in an eternal hell, separated from the person I love I think I would try all options to find closure, to ‘finish it’ as Izzy keeps saying. Xibalba may just represent closure of some sort, the unknown closure that is death, and maybe even death for someone who is eternal.
I was thinking about the eternal pov idea, and if you wrap your head around it, it does make sense, and actually accounts for some of the coincidences in the storyline, after all, they are not the only linear events but selected events to tell a particular story. So some may groan at the notion that Izzy dies right before the discovery of the cure, but supposing this comes from an infinite number of situations our Tom is living through, there would have been situations where Izzy was saved, situations where Izzy died and ten hours later the cure was found, two months, etc. The eternal pov gives artistic license.
I still see it as a pastiche of eternal recurrences in a non-linear fashion, much the way the film is constructed, continually folding over on itself. So again, in this way I see the space tree as a union of Tomas and Izzy. The lifeforce retained from Tomas when he drank the sap continued on in one dimension as retained in a cone, the other dimension retained as Tom Creo, yet these two eventualities folded over in the event where Izzy hands Tom the cone. Space Tom may very well be the same Tom Creo who plants the cone, but he signifies one of the eternal strands which is in anguish and ever separated from his love, side by side with the tree which is the embodiment of the union he is outside of.
The way the story works it reminds me of a lava lamp, with the constant breaking apart and coming into being of the coloured blobs… perhaps there is an allusion to that imagery in the space orb’s journey… it is isolated for so long finally coming back to the whole. When he levitates out of the orb you see that sort of lava lamp breaking apart imagery. And what is a fountain if not a cyclical process breaking apart and coming into being.
Well there is definately room to interpret the story in a linear fashion, the rings of a circle inward as you put it Perc. Or another one of those dreaded spirals from Pi.
I just do not see the cyclical events as metaphorical, there seems to be a direct correlation between the planting of the cone and the space tree, for example. Also what would be the intention of having Tomas sprout into the tree were it not something to do with the strange looking cone Izzy has, and the planting of it over her grave. There still can be a spiral narrative that Aronofsky is employing, a beginning middle and end but I stil think it is a knowing construction built out of an eternal pov, and that these stories are not linked in one way but infinite ways.
This film didn’t hold together as a narrative for me, and yet I found it a profoundly emotional experience, most of all during the last twenty minutes. There were moments of startling beauty and poetry, in which I felt something magical yet was not quite sure how to explain the meaning of succh a visceral reaction. I think the first two comments on this thread apply to my lens for this film, so much so that I am very hesitant to delve into any discussion of its intellectual and symbolic underpinings.
I felt a strong erotic quotient from the close-up shots of the tree and its quivering hairs. When the Conquistador plunged the Mayan knife into the tree I personally felt assaulted,. When the flowers sprouted out of him I found it both appropriate and gorgeous.
Perhaps upon a second viewing I will be less dazzled by the cinematic artistry and therefore more able to piece together the story, but I am not certain of this. The narrative was often incendental. I found the present day scenes the least compelling, and the reason I would shy away from calling this film an unqualified success. The conquistador scenes and the tree/dome scenes were somehow more alluring, and their sensual appeal was dulled by the sheer conventionality that lay in the “doctor finding cure before loved one dies” storyline. Unlike Mike, I did not feel the power of the Jackman/Weiss relationship, and here I agree with the NY Times critic who diagnosed a narrowness in these characters.
But I’m strongly considering seeing it again this weekend, just for the last twenty minutes alone. The melding of music and images, not much one can write that will do it justice. I woke up this morning feeling happy just for having seen this film.
There is a lot of criticism of the Jackman/Weiss relationship and I just do not understand it… there is so much that is metaphorical in this film, things that are bigger than life the way things become monumental with poetic context, and the Love Tom has for Izzy is just another one of those touches, Izzy becomes a symbol of his affection more so than a fully fleshed out character, and I think the same thing could be said of the wife in Solaris (yet few seem willing to challenge it). It is not necessary that we have a fully developed relationship in order to access the feelings… the context should, if it works, fill in any cracks, we should be swept up by the sublime poetry Aronofsky has set the relationship within. To bog the present day story down with intricacies of characterization would pervert what is so good about the film, it is more operatic, or poetic then it is literary.
The actors just needed to sit in for the ideals, and they fit them perfectly. Particularly the future Tom, there is something so fragile and achingly wounded in his presence, and Weiss just being has the aura of the ideal woman in her, and I see nothing wrong with her being this ideal floating around the many versions of Tom. Had there been more scenes fleshing out their relationship I think the key scenes would have been diluted somewhat… the walk in the park is integral and it keeps reoccuring as moments in ones life often do when confronted with a sense of regret. Aronofsky has gone minimal, short and sweet with his narrative, and for me this concentration of cinematic experience works incredibly well. The three periods are not divided as three short stories, this is one long story, one that flows like water, and if you do not maintain the flow, or go with the flow, then you will probably not enjoy the film because your literary mind will be questioning everything… but if you go with the flow these presumptions of character defficiencies cease to be important.
You make an excellent case, Mike, but I can’t ignore the fact that I found my mind wandering to things outside the theater during extended middle part that takes place in the present. It’s not like I’m deciding intellectually to not like these characters because they aren’t fully fleshed out; I’m detaching from them because the few, select notes they are playing aren’t resonating. I wouldn’t doubt this has everything to do with my distaste for:
a) the hospital drame genre which seems to be done to death on TV these days.
b) my own recent cynicism with our obsessive depictions of romanticized romantic relationships, which lately I’ve been thinking says something ill about Western civilization.
I might also add that there is a natural willingness to suspend credulity when one is talking about the Conquistadors of yore or a bubble in space, yet when it comes to the present our minds will instinctivelly notice discrepancies in characters we feel we ought to instantly recognize as common kin.
There is a surton question to Todd Field`s “Little Children” which I think is a very good and important movie for people to understand. I know some of you might not take this serious what I`m about to ask: There is that one sequence where Sarah kisses her new Lover at night on that football field and then there`s his pal who wants to call him for a drink. In that moment there`s a clear “orb” flying across the screen very obvious. Does anyone know if this is suppost to be like that in the movie(cause it has nothin to do with the story). The reason I`m askin is: Well I`m kind of searching for all kinds of unknown stuff, u get me? And i saw orbs like that one, exactly like that one, which are interesting phenomenas. I`m thankful for all informations. Especially I`d like to know if it was planed part of the movie or if they just kepted it in because it looked cool(u can`t really oversee it!). Thx have a nice time