Delayed Reaction: "The Fountain" It’s Thursday, and I’m killing time before “The Office,” so I thought I’d take a second for a movie recommendation.
Thing is, you won’t like the movie. You won’t. Nobody does. Not at first, anyway. The movie is The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s sci-fi epic starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weiss. The history of the movie’s creation is interesting by itself – originally, it had a huge budget and Brad Pitt and Kate Blanchett were set to star. But the budget went out of control, the studio balked, the actors split, and Aronofsky had to rethink the whole thing, eventually recasting it (in which case it helps to be married to a beautiful actress who’s game) and redeveloping all the special effects on a much smaller but no less stunning scale. That won’t affect your enjoyment or lack thereof. I just thought I’d add that in there because I thought it was neat, how failed projects sometimes find new life (still waiting on Terry Gilliam’s “Man of La Mancha” movie with Johnny Depp). Anyway, The Fountain is slow, ponderous, and a bit melodramatic, when it isn’t downright incomprehensible. The plot follows along three tracks, all starring Jackman and Weiss: a conquistador searching for the fountain of youth in the Mayan jungles; a scientist trying to eradicate cancer in time to save his dying wife; and a spaceman in the far future, traveling to a star cluster with a tree for unexplained reasons. The three narratives intersect and entwine enough to give us the sense that it’s all connected by present-day Jackman and Weiss’s dilemma. Considering any one of these could technically make for an interesting movie, it’s bothersome that none of them actually are. They’re all beautifully shot and (considering the reduced budget) gorgeous to look at, but ultimately, when all is said and done, viewers are inclined to ask, “Okay…what the hell was THAT all about?” It’s deliberately obtuse, leaving viewers to do the heavy lifting. And so at first glance, it’s pretty unsatisfying.  But it sinks in, specifically because it leaves the meaning to the viewer’s specific sensibilities.
When I spoke about it with Matt Burns, I learned that we had been watching very different films. I took the more fantastical parts – the conquistador and spaceman bits – as fictional elements within the present-day cancer story. Burns took it all literally, each part creating a larger, fully science fiction story. And I don’t think either of us was wrong. I watched it and saw a symbolic meditation on mortality and the grieving process – because I’m inclined to view things through that lens. Burns took it as a far-reaching realization of the eradication of death, and what that might ultimately look like, because that’s the movie he wanted to see. It may be both these things. On initial viewing, The Fountain is certainly underwhelming. There’s just not a lot going on, the present-day segment feels a bit “Lifetime Movie,” and virtually no explanation is given for the connection between the three segments, just thematic inferences. But I think that makes it a wonderful movie to reflect upon. There aren’t a lot of movies – certainly not a lot of science fiction movies – that trust the viewer enough to take their own meaning from it. This is one, and I recommend it in that sense – even knowing that one possible reflection is, “After sitting with this movie on my mind for a few days, I have come to the decision that I still goddamn hated it.” Which I accept. But I recommend it because I watched it nearly a year ago, and it still stays with me. And so I’ve learned sometimes you have to take a chance on an oddball piece of cinema. Okay, “The Office” is on now. Talk to you later. | 
