Discovering The Fountain
posted 12-11-2006

 
Darren Aronovsky’s film The Fountain was meant to be an indie film. This, despite the fact that big studios were involved early on during nearly ten years’ worth of attempts to make the film, attempts that always fell through for one reason or another, until Aronovsky decided to make it on his own. That meant giving up all the resources that connection to a major studio might provide, including costly special effects and computer-generated imagery. In the end, Aronovsky returned to his indie background in order to get the film made, and the film is better for it.

Remarkable. That’s the first word that occurs once one has seen it.

Raw. Powerful. Provocative. Moving. It’s all that. The editing is so tight and artless that it’s invisible – the flow feels completely uninterrupted. The casting is precisely right: you’d never guess that Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz weren’t Aronovsky’s original choices for the lead roles. Weisz seems born to have been Izzie. Jackman is a revelation: you realize as you watch him that you really didn’t know him before, that you didn’t know he had this in him. And that he’d been wasted in everything he’d done before this. Ellen Burstyn is pitch-perfect in what could have been a throwaway supporting role. In fact, everyone is pitch-perfect. No one sets a foot wrong; there’s not one extraneous gesture, not one wrong word anywhere. Even the sets and locations hit just the right note in atmosphere.

The effects seem like only an extension of the atmospherics that Aronovsky sets up in the other scenes; they’re really that good, they flow logically from the story line, and not one bit of CGI is involved. The ethereal quality of those effects and the incredible depth to them is due to the fact that the images are real ones from the biological world that don’t have to be flashy to be marvelously effective, rather than flat inventions from the FX lab – but I won’t spoil it for you by giving away what Aronovsky used (those who are curious about it will find the surprising answer in other reviews and interviews about the film; try reading the New York Times pieces first).

Suffice it to say that Nature is a much better FX master than anyone in Hollywood or up on George Lucas’s ranch, and that the patterns she creates are often reused or referenced on both a micro and a macro scale where you least expect them. Aronovsky had the good sense to capitalize on that, with hypnotic results that draw you further into the film. The astronomical imagery is every bit as powerful as that used by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey and will, I predict, persist in the filmgoer’s imagination almost as strongly as Kubrick’s did.

So far, so good – but what’s it about, you ask.

One could say that it’s about reincarnation, but that’s not it. Not really. That would be misleading. One could say that it’s about devotion, obsession, passion. Or that it’s about two souls traveling through history together, wherein one keeps trying to save the other but always runs out of time; just at the critical moment, success comes too late. Or about an enduring connection, or another swipe at the Inquisition, or about the timidity and cosmic blindness of most people. Or that it’s about the proposition that all aspects and eras of time exist simultaneously, and people live their lives in parallel in more than one era. Or that it’s about turning loss into redemption. In truth, it’s about a little bit of each of those things, and a lot about something else.

Not unlike Steven Soderbergh’s underrated Solaris, Aronovsky’s The Fountain is a meditation on the nature of existence; and like Solaris, it’s brooding and thought provoking in just the right amount. In fact, they’re both 2001 redux in that respect. You leave the theater immediately wanting to talk to someone about what the film means, what you think some of the theories hinted at might mean, what the consequences are. Whether or not things really are this way. What it truly means to live forever. You find yourself wanting to think about it and talk about it for days before you finally get around to saying, ”Oh yeah, by the way – it’s really good. You have to go see it.” The subject matter reels you in that effectively. It grabs at both sides of your brain and expands your thinking even as it entertains, and you’re so taken by the film that you barely notice until much later. The result is both oddly sobering and surprisingly satisfying.

When I left the theater, I had two immediate questions on my mind. One was about that possibility of living out simultaneous parallel lives as if all eras of time coexisted at once. The other was about consequences. Isabel gives Thomas a mission, a charge, a purpose that is greater than himself or his own life; he gives her the devotion, the strength, the support that allows her to grasp that larger purpose and explain it to him, make him see why it’s necessary. The task benefits humanity, but he takes it on for her, and her alone.

What if you’re Tommy/Tomás but you never meet the Izzie/Isabella who gives your discoveries meaning, or gives you the drive to make them in the first place? What if you’re the Izzie who sees what the discovery will mean, or why the sacrifice is necessary, but you never meet the one who has to take it on, the one you’d inspire? Or you never get anyone who will listen and love and support you enough so that you have the strength to arrive at the insight in the first place? What are the consequences for you and everyone else then?

One thinks: I was meant to have someone love me that much. I need that person, someone my own work can inspire and who can inspire me, who would do for me what really needs doing for the greater good so that I, too, can work for the greater good in my own way. I’m an analyst: I see how things are. I understand that kind of passion, that degree of devotion. I need it to fuel what I must do; and what I do best is think, then communicate. Provocative productive thinking takes a lot of mental and emotional energy; so does survival. Sometimes, you have just enough energy for one and not enough for the other. Not if you’re alone. But if there were two of you, together ...

One thinks further: I need someone to love me that much, so that I can do what I was meant to in the meager time alotted. I need that support system. But he hasn’t shown up. My Thomas/Tommy/Tomás is nowhere to be seen, and time is running short. I can invent him, but I cannot make him real — Nature, fate, or the cosmos must do that. What are the consequences if he never appears? If one parallel life fails, do the others simultaneously fail as well? Can I still fix my own timeline at this stage? Would it be enough for him to appear in just one of these simultaneous lives, or must he be there in all of them? What would it take to get him to show up now, if only in this life? And what would I have to give up, in payment?

You’ll want to see this film again. It will imprint itself upon you and lodge in the mind, lingering. You’ll be disturbed yet drawn to all the questions. And seeing it again will be its own reward. That is Aronovsky’s triumph.

I hope he laughs all the way to the bank and never has to make another studio film again.