You know right from the beginning that “The Fountain” is going to be an unusual experience. With multiple stories intersecting and the same two actors playing different roles, the film is difficult – and sometimes impossible - to follow. Director Darren Aronofsky (“Requiem for a Dream”) has created a beautiful mess with breathtaking visuals and a story that tries your patience. Ultimately, it is a passionate but imperfect film with the director losing most of his audience early on in the story.
Rachel Weisz (“The Constant Gardener”) is Izzy Creo, a woman dying from a brain tumor without much time left to live. Her husband, Tom (Hugh Jackman, “The Prestige”) is a doctor and scientist trying to find a cure for her ailment. However, Weisz is also Queen Isabel, the circa 1500s ruler of Spain who is losing control of her kingdom during the Spanish Inquisition, sending her captain of the guard, Tomas (Jackman), on a crazy quest to find the Tree of Life rumored to grant immortality.
Jackman is also on a different plane of existence inside a bubble with a tree he keeps chewing on while hearing his wife’s voice calling to him. Izzy is also writing a book called “The Fountain” about Queen Isabel and the Tree of Life, but it isn’t clear whether she is writing this from memory or is making it up to hide from the truth of her condition.
Weisz and Jackman pour their hearts out in their performances and give their scenes real heft, especially within the context of the modern story, but the movie jumps back and forth between these three somewhat related stories about every 15 minutes, making each individual story hard to follow and even harder to piece together as a whole.
The historical tale can be fantastical and inspired, but it is so broken up between the other story segments that it’s hard to find your place. A narrative of Izzy’s story “The Fountain” read aloud – think here of a more serious version of “The Princess Bride” with appropriate flashbacks - would have been easier for audiences to digest rather than the mishmash Aronofsky has created. The last storyline showing Jackman alone with the tree, thinking of Izzy and regretting different decisions he made, was too much and the one most lacking context.
Aronofsky, with the performances he managed to extract from the actors and the few powerful scenes - independent of the overall film - he captured, demonstrates to me a talented but undisciplined director. Either that or he purposely made a film that would be difficult to follow. He ultimately didn’t care, preferring to follow his artistic vision to the extreme. If “The Fountain” could have held its stories together with a stronger primary thread - one that you could follow more easily – it would have been a real masterpiece about loss, regret and second chances.
Instead, it is too abstract an experience to capture the interest of all but the most patient and atypical viewer. Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of violent action, some sensuality and language.
