In defence of Dar­ren Aronofsky’s The Fountain

Released to mixed reviews in 2006, The Foun­tain is a curi­ous out­lier in Dar­ren Aronof­sky​’s film­mak­ing career. Arriv­ing off the back of the crit­i­cal suc­cess of 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, it is often dis­missed as the writer/director’s most inac­ces­si­ble, self-indul­gent film. With the pos­si­ble excep­tion of 2017’s Moth­er!, it remains his most divi­sive work.

In fact, The Foun­tain wasn’t even meant to be Aronofsky’s third movie. After com­plet­ing Requiem for a Dream, he was hired by Warn­er Bros to bring Frank Miller’s ​‘Bat­man: Year One’ to the big screen. Work­ing from a script by the acclaimed graph­i­cal nov­el­ist, Aronof­sky enlist­ed future Bruce Wayne Chris­t­ian Bale to don the famous cowl before cre­ative dif­fer­ences between the direc­tor and Miller forced the stu­dio to shelve the project in 2001. Years lat­er, Miller teased that it was the first time he’d ​“worked on a Bat­man project with some­body whose vision of Bat­man was dark­er than mine.” (The unused script is still avail­able to read online.)

With a sud­den gap in his sched­ule, Aronof­sky turned his atten­tion to The Foun­tain, hop­ing Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett would join him as his leads – but again, he strug­gled. When the for­mer abrupt­ly left due to unre­solved script issues, the project fell apart and lay dor­mant until 2004 when Hugh Jack­man and Rachael Weisz helped Aronof­sky res­ur­rect his low-bud­get pas­sion project.

While this off-screen dra­ma has since fad­ed into film his­to­ry, it’s easy to see why The Foun­tain strug­gled to con­nect with audi­ences. Struc­tured as three sto­ries that bleed into one, the film fol­lows Thomas (Hugh Jack­man), a sci­en­tist des­per­ate­ly try­ing to find a cure for his ter­mi­nal­ly-ill wife Isabel­la (Rachael Weisz).

At the same time, we meet Thomas as a 16^th-cen­tu­ry Span­ish con­quis­ta­dor bat­tling his way through the dense jun­gles of South Amer­i­ca in search of the Tree of Life, and Thomas the space trav­eller, float­ing alone in an emp­ty void with the same life-giv­ing tree towards a dying star and the promise of rebirth.

If these sto­ry­lines have a sin­gle over­ar­ch­ing theme, it’s the grim inevitabil­i­ty of death and humanity’s urge to fight it. On a visu­al lev­el, film is laced with exis­ten­tial, hyp­not­ic imagery – swirling golds, daz­zling sil­vers, vibrant reds and greens – like a Tool album cov­er come to life. Thomas’ three-pronged jour­ney sees him trav­el from cold blacks to stark whites, sub­lim­i­nal­ly mir­ror­ing themes of mor­tal­i­ty. The haunt­ing score by the Kro­nos Quar­tet, Mog­wai, and com­pos­er Clint Mansell fur­ther aug­ments the inescapa­bil­i­ty of death.

Like life, The Foun­tain is over all too quick­ly. It ends just as soon as its mes­sage is con­veyed – a reminder that death is com­ing for us all, no mat­ter how hard we try to ral­ly against it, so we might as well just accept it. It is an unde­ni­ably bleak state­ment, which Aronof­sky him­self admit­ted in 2009: ​“The film’s about the fact that it’s okay that we die, and we should come to terms with it,” he told the Guardian. ​“But many, many peo­ple don’t want to think about that, so why pay mon­ey for a med­i­ta­tion on los­ing some­one you love?”

Cin­e­ma has the pow­er to help us try to make sense of even the most dif­fi­cult aspects of the human con­di­tion. And The Foun­tain explores the biggest top­ic of all: the end. The fact that it does so in such a poet­ic, ten­der and visu­al­ly (and aural­ly) expres­sive way per­haps explains why it has become a cult favourite. It is a heart­break­ing, sin­gu­lar view­ing expe­ri­ence that is long over­due a sec­ond look.