Fountain of Shame (Village Voice movie review)

[icymist]

That Darren Aronofsky sure is ambitious. Too bad his movie makes no sense.

by J. Hoberman
November 21st, 2006 1:22 PM

Solemn, flashy, and flabbergasting, The Fountain—adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel—should really be called The Shpritz. The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy, and the metaphysics all wet. The screen is awash in spiraling nebulae and misty points of light, with the soundtrack supplying appropriately moist oohs and aahs.
The Fountain is an exercise in pulp mysticism that, overflowing with ponderous enigmas, universal patterns, and eternalrecurrences, touches all bases in its first few minutes. An opening invocation of Genesis and a close-up of a golden cross segue to a crib from the sacred text, Raiders of the Lost Ark: A fiery Spanish conquistador (Hugh Jackman) is trapped by a horde of growling natives in a jungle cul-de-sac; he escapes by climbing a sacred pyramid to go mano a mano with their flaming high priest. There's a cosmic cut—in the film. Now a bald astronaut who travels in a full lotus position, Jackman wakes up screaming across the snow-globe universe.

Not nearly as pleasurably tacky as a description might make it sound, Aronofsky's historical phantasmagoria jumps among three time zones. There's the 16th-century derring-do in which Rachel Weisz's glamorous Queen Isabella sends Jackman's conquistador to find the Tree of Life and bring back the Sap of Immortality. There's a present-day melodrama in which Weisz appears as the free-spirited Izzi, dying of brain cancer while her renegade medical-researcher spouse Tom (Jackman) races against time to create a cure. Adding to the mystery, Izzi is writing a novel called The Fountain, which is actually the conquistador story and which she begs her husband to complete. (The movie's most impressive special effect is this leather-bound tome written entirely in longhand without a single blotch, erasure, or correction.) Finally and least explicably, there's Tom's 26th-century astral projection.

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[kiahzero]

1. The Onion AV Club gave it a good review

On that basis alone, I'm planning on seeing it at some point.