DVD Review: The Fountain
- Theatrical release date
- November 24, 2006
- DVD release date
- May 15, 2007
- Grade
- A
A movie that reminds us that the journey is often more important than the destination.
To the pre-Contact Maya, death was not so much an ending as a transformation. In myths and art, death is depicted as a force so powerful and so profound, one cannot experience it and remain unchanged. The Hero Twins, for example, die in Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld, but humiliate the death gods by returning to earth as the sun and the moon. The transformative power of death could bring them back, but only by making them over into something new.
If this seems a bit far afield for a DVD review, well, it’s not. Darren Aronofsky has filled his movie with scene after scene depicting, in a sort of visual poem, the power of death to transform rather than destroy. The movie follows three couples: a 15th century conquistador in the Yucatan attempting to bring eternal life back to his queen; a 21st century cancer researcher trying to save his wife from the brain tumor that is killing her; and a futuristic astronaut who is taking a tree (which has some mystical connection to his dead wife) to the Orion Nebula so that they will be caught up in the explosion when the star inside the nebula goes nova. By contributing their molecules to the stellar nursery, the man and the tree will one day, like the Hero Twins, become suns and moons. The Orion Nebula itself is transformed into Xibalba.
By the end, all three timelines have come to some sort of conclusion, but the viewer never knows if any or all of them ever really happened. The 15th century timeline appears to be a fiction written by the dying 21st century woman, but perhaps even she is an invention of the astronaut. Or perhaps the 15th century story represents the 21st century woman’s journey toward death, and the astronaut represents her husband’s. Or perhaps all of it happened just as depicted on-screen. You can take it pretty much any way you wish.
All the elements of this movie work together as well as, or better than, they do in most movies. The female half of the three couples (Rachel Weisz), as the one who has accepted the power of death to transform her, is always brightly lit; she stands or sits or lies in drenching pools of white and golden light. But the man (Hugh Jackman), who has not yet accepted his own inevitable transformation, is often in literal darkness.
Shapes are just as important as light: the future takes place in multiple levels of circles and spheres; the past is a series of lines. By the end, the combination of shape, light, dialogue, composition, and music will make you feel like you’ve literally watched a poem take form in front of you.
Normally, I can’t stand movies with loose ends, but not this time. Scenes stuck in my head and refused to be dislodged. The music kept running through my mind and could not be drowned out. In short, while this is exactly the kind of movie that would usually annoy me, I found it compelling instead.
The last ten minutes could have been tightened up, and the DVD extras aren’t much, but other than that, I’ve got nothing but good to say about The Fountain. You might not be transformed by watching it, but then again, maybe you will be, at least a little. And a little transformation, every now and then, isn’t such a bad thing.
Copyright . Published 1 July 2007 in What’s New.
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