December 09, 2006
The Fountain
Lost in Time
I first became familiar with Darren Aronofsky as a young one in high school. I still remember his film Pi better than I do the 3.14-and-something number we were taught in math class. Combining the sort of experimental effects normally associated with student films together with an intriguing thriller that actually managed to thrill, Pi: The Film introduced me to cinema conventions beyond the suburban multiplex. I was enthralled by everything — from the razor-sharp edits to the super stark and shaky black-and-white imagery, as well as its very visceral moments (a dude puts a power drill to his head!) — and I made the trek from my suburb to Seattle twice to see it. Afronofsky put those visceral skills to work again a few years later in the all-around-intense Requiem for a Dream, which I actually took a date to see. I thought it was a smart move to see a smart movie, but now I gotta wonder if there isn't something to the "date movie" concept.
Anyway, eight years later, I'm still a young one, but now that I've been wrung through college, I've got an education (though I still don't know what pi is), and I'm taught to think I'm more of a thinking man. I like to think I can enjoy a film on the merit of its ideas alone, without a thrilling plot to grab me. In a lot of ways, the situation seems the same for Aronofsky. With his latest film, The Fountain, Aronofsky appears to have built-up the confidence to put his themes front-and-center, carte blanche, with no narrative thrills to take the audience by the hand and guide them along. Unfortunately, the big ideas take hold and never let go, leaving the film itself — and the interrogation of life and death at its heart - somewhat suffocated.
Where Pi's plot was a great by-the-numbers (get it?!) thriller, and Requiem for a Dream a kick-to-the-gut tragedy, The Fountain is at times an almost vanilla melodrama. Its story follows the efforts of Dr. Thomas Creo (Hugh Jackman), an ambitious and brilliant man helming a project to cure cancer while his writer wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) slowly dies of the disease. Thomas is torn between devoting time to Izzi in her last days and his time at the lab, where he races to ensure their life together will last forever. Izzi, meanwhile, endeavors to make Thomas' struggle timeless in her own way, penning a poetic analogy about Spanish conquistadors, outer space, and the search for the fountain of youth.
The Fountain itself is largely composed of these two things: lots of Hallmark moments between Izzie and Thomas, full of shot/reverse shot dialogue; and the poetic analogies of Izzie's story, illustrated with beautifully constructed set pieces that tear through the jungles of Central American and fly through the nebulas of the outer cosmos. At times, I was reminded of Chris Marker's famous short film La Jetee (the basis for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys). It too deals with themes of time travel, the aching adventure to hold onto love forever, and the eternal return of fate and destiny.
What The Fountain lacks is Marker's simplicity. La Jetee is composed of still images and voice-over narration, and nothing more; it doesn't need actors or million-dollar effects to tell its story. The Fountain is far more overbearing. The actors bellow and whisper, trying hard to give life to the script's rather detached dialogue — detached, perhaps, because it seems to exist in order to reference Aronofky's themes rather than give them a human dimension. The actors' are frequently successful in meeting the scripts' demands of building the maturity of Izzi and Thomas' relationship in the moment — what amounts to a love story with no back story, a marriage we are to take for granted — but their efforts are frequently overwhelmed by the arranged beauty Aronofsky surrounds them with. The exchanges between Izzi and Thomas in their Spanish guises, for instance, seem stilted amidst the art direction of the royal hall.
Word is that Aronofsky consciously chose to not use CGI in The Fountain in order not to date it, to give it a sort of timelessness. The intelligence of this decision radiates throughout the film, and all its sci-fi compositions notably lack the fuzziness that almost single-handedly killed the fun of the Star Wars franchise (of course, Lucas's scripts didn't help either). But it's this same try at timelessness that leaves The Fountain flowing so dry: everything is deprived of context, depoliticized and dehistoricized, for the sake of the poetic image. Pi and Requiem for a Dream at least referred to struggles in our world as we know it — for instance, Max, the protagonist of Pi, has to fend off the aggressive overtures of both corporations and religious sects that want what he's got.
Nothing like that exists in The Fountain. First we're introduced to bloodthirsty Mayans as anthropologically anachronistic as anything in Mel Gibson's apocryphal Apocalypto, only to discover by the film's end that — surprise! — the Mayan's and the secrets they keep are really just in tune with the Earth, essentially trading one stereotype for another. Throw in some half-baked references to Eastern religion — watch for the Yoga Superman sequence — and what you get are entire cultures, peoples, and religions, put in service to Aronofsky's metaphors. It may be a Western film tradition — Malick, Herzog, Peter Jackson — but its an old one whose death is long overdue.
It's funny to think that ideas similar to those in The Fountain were tackled with stronger political undertones in the 1962 B-movie The Brain that Wouldn't Die, even if it severely lacks Aronofsky's aesthetic amenities. The Brain also follows the experiments of a calculating, quixotic surgeon/scientist who does everything in his power to keep his wife alive. Unlike Thomas Creo, however, this doctor is a resolute sleezeball caught in the rapture of lust, not love. The doctor uses the opportunity of his wife's decapitation in a car wreck to keep her head alive in a pan of juice; meanwhile he ventures on a sick, lecherous quest for the body of a more sexually alluring woman. The wife uses her cutting intellect to organize a rebellion amongst her husband's deformed laboratory subjects. It's pure schlock, to be sure, but at least its feminist fable has a message for our age, rather than one aiming for the Ages.
Whatever his faults, I'm going to keep my eye on Aronofsky. Even if how he deploys his metaphors is occasionally clumsy, The Fountain finally cements certain themes as purely his own. The film is full of motifs from his previous movies — everything from eternal return and the pursuit of the elusive key to existence, to vaguely Eastern ideas of equilibrium (think of the tai chi in the park at the end of Pi); from the ravages of disease to, well, bald heads (though no power drill this time around). This made me realize, finally, that Aronofsky's ideas were not merely afterthoughts amidst his flashy visceral style, but that he's been serious about them all along. Even so, by going for broke and allowing the artful ambitions to take over, The Fountain has me wanting to return to his earlier work, like Pi, where for all the style, the ideas are more subtle, woven within a compelling contemporary narrative, and probably smarter for it.
