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The Fountain (Mark's take)
01/01/2007 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Mystic pizza. This is an enigmatic story involving the Tree of Life with three story lines: one in the 1500s, one in the near future, and one in the far future, says Mark. Darren Aronofsky is less interested in coherence than in creating New Age-ish cosmic images. This is the sort of film that plays much better at midnight whether you stay up that late or not. Buy The Fountain in the USA - or Buy The Fountain in the UK  Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10
The film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY actually caught on when a certain sort of customer discovered it was a great film to see stoned. If there are any of you guys left around, boy do I have a film for you! You will probably not see another film like this one this year. You many not see one like this again this decade. And you may never see the credit "Directed by Darren Aronofsky" ever again.
The story conflates the biblical Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden with the Fountain of Youth that Ponce de Leon searched for in the New World and failed to find. In the 1500s Tomas Creo (played by the ubiquitous Hugh Jackman) comes to explore the New World. Through mystical means he believes he has a map of the way to the Tree of Life that God has hidden in the Mayan jungles. The radiantly beautiful but otherwise uninteresting Queen Isabel (Rachel Weisz) sends him on this mission.
Interwoven with this plot line we have the story of Tom (Hugh Jackman), a near-future medical researcher who is trying to cure disease, but instead finds his new botanical substance may also reverse aging and restore youth. He has a special interest in saving lives and giving immortality because his beautiful wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) is dying of a brain tumour and Tom will wants to save her life. Her hobby is writing - longhand - a story of Tomas Creo who may be real or may be her fictional imagining. We do not know for sure which so we do not know if we are supposed to accept the 1500s story as being fact in this world or her fiction. She is creative, but still is an untouchable image, emotionally as flat as Queen Isabel.
A third plot thread takes place in the far future with Tommy (Hugh Jackman) floating in Xibalba, a golden glowing nebula out in space. He is there to worship his love embodied as a tree. The tree has absorbed his love more or less like something out of "The Quatermass Experiment". The tree cannot talk to him, being a tree, but it does show its love by having tendril-like fibers in its bark respond to the proximity of his Tommy's hand.
Bits and pieces of what is going on do sneak past all the beautiful, but mostly incomprehensible imagery to tantalize the viewer with hints of what the story is actually about. These frequently take the form of images repeated from one age to the next. For example, there is a repeating image of three stars (or holes or objects) forming an equilateral triangle to point to the fourth object at the center. Or we see a car or a horse coming at the camera, but the camera is upside-down. The eye is momentarily confused, but as the car/horse passes under camera, our view follows it turning right side up. One wonders whose point of view this is supposed to be.
Eventually the coherence of the story is forgotten and replaced by more incomprehensible images. Certainly we see mandalas as a background for Tom floating and levitating in lotus position. The images are nicely reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s psychedelic style. The story is very nicely illustrated, but opaquely told.
The film appears to be short in a most thrifty manner. All scenes seem to have been filmed on a soundstage, and a small one at that, making the film seem a little claustrophobic, ironic for it cosmic themes. The film does have major actors like the ubiquitous Jackman and like Weisz. Smaller roles go to Aronofsky veterans Ellen Burstyn and Mark Margolis.
It is hard to completely pan a film that is so visually, if claustrophobically, stunning. But it is harder to recommend a film that is so cryptic as to be incomprehensible. This is a film for the very narrow audience who can be just be immersed in its mysterious cosmic imagery. Drink deep of this fountain or not at all. I rate it a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or 4/10.
Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 2006 Mark R. Leeper
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