Lost in space, dying of spiritual thirst: Looking back at Darren Aronofsky's Fountain

On the eve of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, I thought it would be fun to look back at a review I wrote for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a film almost unanimously dismissed upon its appearance at TIFF 2006, and which might have torpedoed the ambitious young filmmaker's career if it weren't followed by the much celebrated The Wrestler, which had its North American premiere at TIFF 2008. Aronofsky's Black Swan is among the most anticipated films playing at this year's festival.

***

Six years after Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain finally arrives with a hefty load of extra-filmic baggage –an infamously protracted and tumultuous production, boos at the Venice Film Festival– and a premise so dazzlingly pretentious as to guarantee responses even more polarized that those that met its predecessor. Yet if this finds the right audience –probably small, probably fans of Ken Russell films, Herman Hesse novels, CG Jung, Joseph Campbell and psychotropic substances– it will in its peculiar way be embraced as the sort of wildly flawed, improbably ambitious gem that comes along only rarely, a phenomenon akin to a comet, the sighting of some endangered beast, or a functioning health care system.

The Fountain’s structure is tripartite and intrinsically circular. In one strand we find Thomas (Hugh Jackman), a genetic scientist desperate to shrink a tumour in a monkey’s brain while his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) dies from some terrible illness and composes an enigmatic novel in laughably immaculate calligraphy. In the second, Tomas (again, Jackman) is a conquistador charged with finding the Mayan tree of life in the New World for the lovely Queen Isabel (Weisz). In the third, Tom (yep, Jackman) is the lone inhabitant of some hermetic ball adrift in space, haunted by voices and doing kung fu against the stars. These narratives dove-tail and are compressed into 96 minutes, an impressively taut running time that renders two of these strands, not inappropriately, into virtual cinematic haikus. Visual dynamics dominate: long-shots press up against extra-tight close-ups; gaseous portals seep through the jaundiced glow of space, recalling old sci-fi paperback covers; terrifyingly fecund jungles give way to stark wintry plains. The aesthetic is alternately seductive, chillingly lonely and somewhat oppressive.

Dialogue tends to be awkward, scenes contrived and characters more symbolic than recognizable. What’s of substance here is the fluid realization of deeply primal themes, thus Aronofsky thinks nothing of having a scene where Jackman stabs a tree and out flows the juice of immortality! Which looks suspiciously like cum. Weisz is required mostly to be beatific, yet Jackman’s unruly performance somehow ascends to operatic heights, matching Aronofsky’s lofty themes with vivid romantic fortitude. For every scene that courts ridicule there’s another that, call me crazy, is strangely, profoundly moving. In his desire for everlasting life and love, Tom sacrifices immediacy, and his is a tragedy written in glyphs, not naturalistic gestures.

Because it aspires to fuse images and music into an expression of abstract spiritual and mythical concepts, The Fountain will, for some, invite only mockery and dismissal. But against my more sober criteria, I found myself kind of swept up in it, beguiled by its preposterous beauty and over-earnest transcendentalism, its inarticulate fatalism that finally speaks to our innate sense of eternal return. I can accept or even welcome whatever jabs at its abundant silliness others might make, but I still can’t deny that I left the film feeling eerily connected to that guy sitting cross-legged in his little ball.

Unlucky numbers: Knowing

In just about any movie where the protagonist is a teacher you can usually count on a classroom scene in which the movie’s themes and conflicts are announced. It’s surprising actually how often the convention works. It’s a way of playing fair with the audience and certainly preferable to having the characters make similar announcements in the thick of a heated climax. Early in Knowing astrophysicist and MIT prof John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) engages his students in a conversation about determinism, randomness and purpose. Koestler’s a man of science, the errant son of a pastor, and a still grief-stricken widower. For him, “shit just happens.” And if there’s one thing you can say about Knowing, it’s that a lot of massively cataclysmic shit happens.  

Call it disaster porn. Through a series of coincidences that are surely more than just coincidences Koestler gets his hands on a paper covered in numbers that’s been buried underground for 50 years, its author a creepy little girl who’s since grown up and died. During a drunken math binge Koestler unravels the document’s hidden code, which prophesizes a series of wickedly fatal disasters, most of which have already come to pass—but there’s still three left! Can Koestler, recklessly/stupidly throwing himself into the eye of the hurricane, prevent these catastrophic events? The little girl got all the other ones right, so hey, you do the math. But you may want to cover your eyes when the screaming crowds being crushed to pulp or the burning bodies stumble about begging for mercy. Some of this shit will give you nightmares.

For better or for worse, Alex Proyas, who helmed cult favourite Dark City, fully commits to the material, which means balancing Koestler’s personal revelation and Cage’s odd, sleepy breed of hysteria with the broader story of global apocalyptic hysteria. If you’re willing to go along with this thing, there’s something genuinely compelling at the base of all this. Loony, half-baked and more than a little friendly to religious nuts and conspiracy theorists alike, but compelling. Of course, there’s also something stupendously silly about numerous key points on which the plot turns: the messages scrawled under a bed, the skinny blonde stalkers in overcoats, the risible final images of some sort of paradise that cry out to be included as outtakes on a DVD for The Fountain. You have to admire Knowing’s willingness to go all the way with its catastrophic equations, yet it arguably could have benefited from a few hints of ambiguity, a little room for doubt. In life and art alike, certainty can be a precarious thing.