The Fountain

It's been six years since Darren Aronofsky wowed a generation of young filmgoers with his sensational treatment of addiction, Requiem for a Dream. Now he's back with a stab at the kind of personal, visionary cinema his new-found reputation seemed to demand: a metaphysical sci-fi movie starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz (Mrs Aronofsky). Delayed and truncated by the ankling of Brad Pitt some years ago, The Fountain turns out to be three terrible films for the price of one.

There's no pleasure in stomping on an adventurous creative talent with lofty ambitions. On the basis of Requiem for a Dream and his debut film, Pi, I was looking forward to The Fountain and hoping that reports of critical derision at the film's Venice Film Festival premiere were exaggerated. Many good films have been booed at festivals before now.

The Fountain has a few supporters, and may yet find some kind of cult following willing to overlook its shortcomings. And to be sure, the film has a couple of major plus points. It has a universal theme; a lovely, lush, dark, golden look; and a very different tempo to Aronofsky's previous films, with slow, searching zooms taking over from his staccato editing tics (for a while at least). I loved Clint Mansell's yearning minimalist score, and thought Weisz worked wonders with a wretched non-part (or two).

But the script is pap, honestly. Aronofsky plays loose with the structure to keep the thing afloat for as long as he can, but if we iron it out it looks like this: Hugh Jackman is Tommy Verde, a research scientist in love with his job - until his wife Izzi goes down with a terminal illness, and he realizes the error of his ways. Desperate to find a cure, he operates on chimpanzee brains round the clock� when he inadvertently finds a way to reverse the aging process he angrily shrugs off the results as a distraction from his aim. In the film's best line, Dr Tommy positively screams, 'Death is the disease! There is a cure and I will find it!'

One of those old fashioned novelists who write longhand, Izzi accepts her fate with serenity - but she wants Tommy to finish the last chapter of her book, please. This is 'The Fountain', of course, a florid 15th Century tale of Tomas (Hugh Jackman), a Spanish conquistador sent to South America to discover the fountain of youth and thus save the Queen (Weisz) from bondage (the Inquisition).

Watching this tripe unfold, you can sympathise with Tommy's hesitation to take it on.

Then there are scenes of a bald Jackman, floating around in a space bubble, munching on pieces of hairy bark from the Tree of Life. No, I am not making this up!

These cosmic scenes are a serviceable definition of that old hippy phrase 'Far out', but at least Jackman's zen solitude spares us the melodramatic hokum that infects the rest, even if he still being hen-pecked by his inamorata in the beyond. They're also almost too beautiful for words, if you can stifle your guffaws.

The Fountain is one of a kind, though it belongs in the same outer galaxy as Steven Soderbergh's Solaris and Spielberg's AI. It has a philosophical core it doesn't try to hide - that's enough to invite ridicule by itself. But it is possible to be broadly sympathetic to Aronofsky's ideas about death (which seem to be derived from Buddhism and Carlos Castaneda) and still find his movie dismayingly facile.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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