Space Case

Darren Aronofsky's mildly daffy sci-fi yarn is a movie worth believing in.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Nov 21, 2006

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Thrown into the Thanksgiving breach almost four years to the day after Steven Soderbergh's Solaris, Darren Aronofsky's long-gestating dream project is similarly steeped in the scent of disaster. Not only did the film famously collapse in 2002 when Brad Pitt, its original star, pulled out weeks before shooting, but the prog-rock swan song of Aronofsky's quasi-mystical sci-fi romance is all but certain to be drowned out by the blare of awards-season hype and holiday fun fare.

The Fountain's plot almost defies description, and it certainly dares you to keep a straight face. The central story is that of Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman), a medical researcher whose wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz) is dying of cancer. But the movie starts in the 16th century, where Jackman plays a Spanish conquistador searching for a lost Mayan temple, and then flashes forward to the distant future, where a bald, cross-legged Jackman is literally floating in space.

It sounds, to be sure, like a mess, and it gets messier. In the present, Izzi goes on about the Mayan legend of Xibalba, a gathering place for dead souls that turns out to be the light of a nebula wrapped around a dying star. In the past, Jackman is attacked by a man with a flaming sword who yells, "Death is the path to awe!" And in the future, well, he talks to a tree.

You'd be within your rights to guffaw at all this, as most of my colleagues already have. (At least at the screening I saw, the audience was polite enough to hold their snorts until the end credits.) But disbelief is not a mark of sophistication any more than belief is a mark of simplicity, and The Fountain is a movie worth believing in.

The movie's theme, elemental and a little baldly stated, is the circularity of life, the idea that death is a part of the cycle of creation and not an end to it. In all of his incarnations, Tom is a self-styled conqueror, pitting himself against the natural order. In the present, he becomes obsessed with finding a cure for Izzi's brain tumor, brushing aside the chance discovery of a chemical compound that seems to reverse the aging process. In the past, at the orders of his queen (Weisz again), he travels to the jungles of "New Spain" seeking the legendary tree of life. And in the future, encased in a transparent bubble zooming past the stars, he seems to have triumphed over time as well as space. The sequences set in the past are eventually revealed to be dramatizations of a novel Izzi is in the process of writing, but the movie leaves open the possibility that the future sequences are literal rather than metaphorical, that Tom's mystery compound has in fact revealed the secret of eternal life, and he has spent untold centuries seeking a way to save Izzi's life.

The quote that opens the movie ties The Fountain to the book of Genesis, and the movie explicitly references the two trees in the garden of Eden: the tree of life, which presumably would have made Adam and Eve immortal, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from which they fatefully ate instead. The movie's spirituality is primarily synthetic, a somewhat fuzzy blend of East and West, pagan and modern. But it embodies, perhaps unintentionally, the biblical interpretation in which knowledge is a form of congress, not mere awareness — that before Adam and Eve "knew" good and evil, it effectively did not exist. Pursuing mastery over life, Tom inadvertently enters into a fuller understanding of death, and its central place in the process of creation, a cyclical notion reflected in the movie's circle-obsessed design, its Mobius strip structure, even Izzi's palindromic name. It also comes out in the way Matthew Libatique films the hanging candles in a medieval church to resemble a field of stars, and the subatomic reactions under Tom's microscope mirror the airy contortions of interstellar matter. The latter are realized with particularly stunning grace, created with practical rather than digital effects. Even when it soars off into space, the movie never disappears entirely into the clouds.

(sam@citypaper.net)

The Fountain

Written and directed by Darren AronofskyA Warner Bros. releaseOpens Wednesday at Ritz theaters

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