Movie review: The Fountain

by John P. Meyer

It's a truly jejune film. I don't know what jejune means (I just like the sound of it), but that's O.K. because I have no idea what this film means, either - and I just spent 96 minutes watching it. Attentively, I might add.

As far as I'm concerned, when you read something like this on a fan forum in relation to a film - "Movies such as The Fountain demand an open mind to new concepts and ideas and different perspectives on life" - you have received fair warning. Show up at the theater with your skullcap propped open with titanium toothpicks, or prepare to author internal dialogue suitable for use on the resurrected world premiere of MST3K.

Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is a truly jejune film. I don't know what jejune means (I just like the sound of it), but that's O.K. because I have no idea what this film means, either - and I just spent 96 minutes watching it. Attentively, I might add.

I can certainly tell you what it's about on a surface level: it's about Hugh Jackman dressing up variously as 1) a long-haired leather-pantsed conquistador; 2) a well-groomed scrubs-wearing brain surgeon; and 3) a jump suited, bald-pated floating yogi. While wafting through space in an eco-sealed glass sphere, his yogic persona spends a lot of time (because he's got a lot of time on his mudra-making hands, I guess) tattooing himself with the nib of a fountain pen (OUCH!) and reverentially scraping bits of scabby bark from the hairy tree that seems to be the focus of his celestial journey - and then eating it (Yech! Ptui!).

Furthermore, it's about Rachel Weisz looking bedraggled and serenely pale on the point of death in a hospital bed, while alternately looking regal and glowing in her Queen Isabella incarnation. Oh, and I suppose you could say that's also her under the scabby tree bark in the floating-in-space sequences, because I think Aronofsky's trying to lay a three-way allegory on us in which The Sick Tree = The Sick Wife = The Endangered Queen. In fact, a basic theme of the film is a subtle variation on that of a current hit TV drama: "Save the tree/wife/queen, save the world."

It's a movie rich with silences, sometimes in places where we'd normally expect to hear heart-tugging string accompaniment in the score. And here the silences are effective, because they add to the sense that what we're watching is something beyond the scope of film's accepted Weltanschauung. The silences add to the texture of the experience, and this thing is definitely textural; sometimes uncomfortably so (as when we're treated to breathy close-ups of the Jackman lips kissing the electrostatically-charged hairy tree). Where the silences detract are those sequences where explanation might have been called for: at some point Aronofsky must have made a decision to exclude a narrator who might have helped to tie together some of the loose strings of the parallel scenarios. He apparently thought that a sense of unreality and disconnectedness would better serve his audience. Well, he got it.

In all fairness, The Fountain clearly represents a well-intentioned effort on Aronofsky's part to expose filmgoers to a view of the world that's refreshingly less materialistic and more spiritual than their everyday grub-a-dub-dub lame duck Republican reality. He might have better prepared them for the experience by requiring them to read these two books before showing up at the theater: book1, book2. Because without this syllabus as a foundation, your average Joe/Jill fresh from their new-car smell polycarbonate interior is going to look at the bald guy in the space bubble and go, "What the f***?!"

The problem with authoring a work about big cosmic questions (like "what happens after I die?") is that you either need to make a stab at answering them, or show some kind of character development on the part of the questioners - beyond merely a frustration with their inability to come up with answers. (Any one of us could author a script along that line.) Unfortunately, by the last reel of The Fountain, all we're left with is the seed pod from a sweet gum tree: cryptic, at best.

In the interest of honesty and full disclosure, I actually do know what the word "jejune" means. And it applies here.

LOOKS LIKE: As the tonsorially-challenged space-traveling lotus position-assuming mystic, Jackman bears an amazing resemblance to Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor. With less expression.

DEEP THOUGHTS: "Death is the road to awe" - Mayan priest to Tomas, Jackman's conquistador incarnation.

CRYSTALLIZATION OF THE FILM'S THEME IN ONE LINE OF DIALOGUE: "I feel different every moment, each one!" - Izzi Creo (Rachel Weisz), as she proceeds down that jammin' road to awe.

TREE SAP GUZZLING ADVISORY: That Tree of Life dude is something of a literalist; swig at your own risk.

This story was submitted by a member of the TexasGigs community.