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.