Writer-director Darren Aronofsky leaped straight into the league of interesting filmmakers with his debut, x or Pi, as in the number 3,1415926535, just to give you the first 10 decimal places. Here, in this tale of a Jewish Kabbalist-mathematician high on mystical numerology, was a sharply made feature that felt like something genuinely new, both in terms of the kind of story it told and how it told the story.
Aronofsky followed x with Requiem for a Dream, his adaptation of the hair-rasing novel of addiction by Hubert Selby Jnr, also the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn. And what a fine job Aronofsky did of that story of a mother and son each spiralling ever deeper into the abyss of drug abuse.
And now we have The Fountain, Aronofsky’s much-bruited new movie — and one, moreover, with a fantasy/time-travelling storyline. You’d have thought such an idea was just perfect for this director, who makes a virtue of a jumpy edit and isn’t afraid of a little obliquity. Brad Pitt must have thought so too, because he was attached to the project at one point.
In the end, though, Aronofsky made The Fountain with Hugh Jackman in the lead, and, sad to say, it simply doesn’t work. Not because it has Jackman instead of Pitt; Jackman appears to be doing his best. So does Aronofsky, but to no avail. The movie looks marvellous, but the three parallel storyÂÂlines just don’t have the required punch, and you are left feeling you have been subjected to the fuzziest kind of New Age mumbo-jumbo.
That wouldn’t be a problem if the mumbo-jumbo were propelling a good storyline; many a great movie has been based on ideas one would barely entertain during a drunken blabfest. Perhaps it’s that in The Fountain the story becomes the means towards the end of a whole lot of floaty golden-hued mysticism, rather than the other way round.
Jackman plays three roles (or maybe they are one) in three different time zones. In the present day, or something vaguely like it, he’s Tom, a scientist searching for the elixir of life. This search is especially important to him because his beloved, Izzi (Rachel Weisz), is dying. She’s also writing a novel (by hand, in a big book, as people do in movies — heaven forfend they should use an ordinary old computer like the rest of us), which concerns the 16th-century Queen Isabella of Spain and her favourite conquistador, Tomas (Jackman again).
Queen Isabella sends Tomas to the then New World to find the Tree of Life, said to be sited somewhere near or on top of a Mayan pyramid. That’s strand two of the story, and, despite the fact that there’s not much of it, for me it worked the best of the three — Aronofsky should have made a mumbo-jumbo adventure epic set in the 16th century. Jackman is better used chopping his way through the jungle than torturing lab monkeys for the sake of science.
In the third strand, Jackman is in some undefined spiritual or cosmic realm, doing yoga on what appears to be a rock floating through space. This seems to be happening far into the future, and the floating rock also bears the aforementioned Tree. Perhaps it’s taking place in some realm of life after death, where the reincarnation of Tom/Tomas is continuing his search for eternal life by other means, mostly of the heavily metaphorical variety. (Where, though, is Izzi’s soul or reincarnation? Doing aerobics on a different space-rock?)
The effects in this cosmic sequence are breathtaking, but they lack a narrative point. Or, rather, we get the point, kind of — but we can’t really feel for the characters and what this all means for them, because they are just shorthand sketches for characters. In the central, present-day story, for instance, Tom is the stereotype of the obsessive scientist — almost a parody of the kind found in a 1950s creature-feature. (I kept thinking of Todd Haynes’s send-up of such figures in Poison.) Izzi, on the other hand, is clearly meant to be the most wonderful woman in the world, which inclines her to a beatific simper, or to endlessly inviting Tom for walks, or sitting shoeless in the snow while gazing at the stars. This is a well-known characteristic of people well on their way to sainthood.
Jackman at least has different hairstyles in the various sequences, going from long-haired in the 16th century to shaven-headed in the distant future or afterlife, with an ordinary medium-to-short haircut in the interim. This isn’t much help, though. It’s hard to care about a hairdo.