Guy de Fraumeni’s Hollywood In The Hamptons

The Fountain is a spacey, spinning, good lookin’ sorta sci-fi quest, covering a span of 1,000 years, seeking eternal love and life. I can flippantly sum up the film with a very old joke about a fellow who searches for decades to find the meaning of life. Finally, he goes to an ancient guru in the Himalayas who knows all. He pleads “What is life?” The sage stares into the setting sun for a long time then answers, “Life is a fountain.” The seeker of wisdom screams, “I’ve traveled thousands of miles for years only to hear that ‘Life is a Fountain?’ Life is a Fountain???” The guru is shocked. “Life is not a Fountain?”

The Fountain’s cyclical (it goes around in circles) adventure begins in the 16th Century, with actor Hugh Jackman playing a Spanish conquistador who has been sent by Queen Isabel to find the Tree of Life (aka the Fountain of Youth). Mr. Jackman will also appear as two more versions of the same person throughout the film. As the Spaniard, Tomas, his never-to-be-love is the gorgeous Queen, lovely and dark and troubled by the Inquisition, portrayed by Rachel Weisz. Weisz also plays Jackman’s character’s wife, Izzy, in the section of the fractured scenario that takes place in the present. Jackman’s name in the present story is Tommy Creo, a research scientist who is also on a quest to find the Tree of Life. In this incarnation, the actor has fortunately gotten rid of the wild beard he wore as Tomas that kept getting tangled in the dense jungles of Central America and the even denser tangles of the silly story line. Tragically, Tommy Creo’s Izzy is dying of cancer. Tommy, the scientist, reluctantly falls back on the romantically spiritual Tree of Life for help, and, figuring that it could be healing, he bites the bullet and uses tree bark on a lab monkey as a cure for cancer. I don’t think it worked too well, because in the future, the third story line, Izzy has become a tree! Gee, Tommy, maybe a tad too much tree bark? Way in the future, Tommy is now Tom, a bald astronaut. You will do better if you try to judge where you are in the film timewise by how hairy Mr. Jackman’s character is. I guess his bark is worse than his bite.

Do not expect a sequential time frame. The director and conceptor, Darren Aronofsky (Pi and Requiem For a Dream) does away with all reference to narrative. Instead of constructing a story with a beginning, middle and end, he utilizes beautiful imagery, photographed by Matthew Libateque, to project visual descriptions and convey a cinematic language of his own. Sadly, the metaphors, complicated by poetic, filmic rhyming, may numb your sensory nerves so much that it has you asking, “What is happening in what world?” However, if you slide down in your seat, pretend you’re breathing in the heavy, heady smoke wafting about your head from the 1970s, relax and take your own time-space trip to the past and try to see the screen as a really big mandala, swirling in lovely, colorful patterns in front of you, you might just start to see the impression of a compelling, personal story. This might be your only hope, because you’re not going to get The Fountain otherwise. Mr Aronofsky was too busy creating his personal vision to bother with character development or a believable plot.

We all want a movie that is so arty to succeed, but the filmmaker has dashed The Fountain’s hopes of fitting into the art genre by loading it with so many explanations – very doubtful notions of Mayan Xibalba, Einsteinian stretches of past and present erasing themselves, and a lot of other baloney that rings as hollow as a dead tree. Aronofsky’s The Fountain wants us (I hope) to believe that love will last, even as life, as we know it, does not. Sorrowfully, the ardor of Jackson and Weisz’s love is never fanned bright enough to convince us, so how can we expect the flames to last?

My heart goes out to Mr. Aronofsky and his dream – finally realized after eight years of bitter disappointments. I will not weep though, because I doubt that he conceived the movie as art. Art is the thing that is immortal. I do think he’s a very good filmmaker, but not an artist. You will find The Fountain on DVD A.S.A.P.

Life definitely is not a fountain. Not this one, anyway.

Guy-Jean de Fraumeni is the producer/writer/director of award-winning European and American feature films. He has been a judge at Major Film and TV award competitions, including the Oscars, the Emmys and various film festivals. Sarah Halsey assists him.