MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Fountain'


Slightly longer version of a review in the Thanksgiving-movie roundup in today's Oregonian ...




“The Fountain” was almost made with a gargantuan budget starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. When you see the lower-cost version that director/co-writer Darren Aronofsky (“Pi”) brought to screen after Pitt bailed, that seems inconceivable.

It’s inconceivable because it’s hard to imagine a mainstream studio throwing $70 million (the original budget) at a movie this brazenly spiritual, psychedelic, plot-rejecting and audience-dividing. “The Fountain” contains action and spectacle, yes, but the visuals are (brilliantly) placed in the service of a nonlinear story about the power of love and the inevitability of death.

The result feels like a cross between “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and the final scenes of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The movie dances between three overlapping, millennium-spanning storylines -- each starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. The central story follows an obsessed doctor trying to eradicate his wife’s brain tumor at the expense of other, profound discoveries. Two other threads spin from his wife’s incomplete novel: A conquistador searches for the Tree of Life to save his queen, and a monastic astronaut ascends to a dying star to revive a tree that’s also, somehow, his lover’s ghost.

All three Jackman characters seek miracles; but can they truly surrender to the idea that “death is the road to awe”?

Aronofsky polishes his images to a diamond sheen: “The Fountain” is packed with Shambhala symbols and visual motifs underscoring his ambition to weave three powerful, interlocking love stories into a provocative Zen koan -- an irrational riddle designed to shake the brain and wake the spirit. It’s an ambitious, passionate, grief-stricken work of film art. It's probably going to tank at the box-office, but I think cult audiences will be discussing it for years.

Pick your destiny in weekend movies (The Oregonian, Nov. 22, 2006)

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Posted: Wed - November 22, 2006 at 04:49 PM        

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