The Fountain | Little White Lies

The Foun­tain

25 Jan 2007 / Released: 26 Jan 2007

Two individuals, a man and a woman, interacting in a dimly lit setting with books and other objects in the background.
Two individuals, a man and a woman, interacting in a dimly lit setting with books and other objects in the background.
5

Anticipation.

The most highly anticipated film of this magazine’s life.

5

Enjoyment.

An emotional powerhouse that sucks you in and rips you apart layer by layer. An unparalleled experience.

5

In Retrospect.

A cinematic Ground Zero. The best film of Aronofsky’s career.

An emo­tion­al pow­er­house that sucks you in and rips you apart lay­er by lay­er. An unpar­al­leled experience.

So much love: The Mayans tell the sto­ry of an old man. When he died, his son plant­ed a seed on his grave. The seed became a tree, the tree grew into a for­est and bloomed, and the old man’s spir­it flew with the birds. Tom Creo tells a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. It’s writ­ten across his body, etched in the lines of his face. It’s a sto­ry of pain and grief. A sto­ry he’s strug­gled with for a thou­sand years.

Dar­ren Aronof­sky tells a sto­ry in The Foun­tain. A sto­ry of love and loss that rip­ples over space and time, from the ancient tem­ples of Span­ish South Amer­i­ca, to the cos­mic dust clouds of the far future. A sto­ry that daz­zles, bewil­ders and utter­ly beguiles.

What are we to make of The Foun­tain? How do you respond to a film of such reck­less self-belief that it reach­es for the pow­er of spir­i­tu­al rev­e­la­tion? The answer, as it hap­pens, is sim­ple: if you’re pre­pared to walk that thin line with The Foun­tain, if you’re pre­pared to let it under your skin, it will break your heart.

How­ev­er you react to the film intel­lec­tu­al­ly, The Foun­tain is an utter­ly believ­able jour­ney into one man’s pain, anchored by an incred­i­ble per­for­mance from Hugh Jack­man as Tom Creo. While Aronof­sky sur­rounds him with com­plex­i­ty, Tom is root­ed in the sim­ple, end­less grief of lost love, as he watch­es his wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz), slip through his fin­gers. His pain is recog­nis­able, ago­nis­ing, and, sup­port­ed by Clint Mansell’s riv­et­ing score, it will leave you gasp­ing for breath.

The film has the intri­ca­cy of a poem: it’s elu­sive and it can be unfor­giv­ing, but it’s car­ried by those pure waves of emo­tion­al ener­gy. It’s a divi­sive, dif­fi­cult film that prac­ti­cal­ly invites ridicule, but you get the feel­ing, tri­umphant­ly, that

Aronof­sky doesn’t care. He’s reset­ting the para­me­ters of sci­ence fic­tion. He’s made a film that isn’t about genre or prece­dent. It’s about vision, belief and ambi­tion. If any­thing it echoes Kubrick’s 2001, but The Foun­tain is no spaced-out odyssey.

Like Kubrick, Aronof­sky has cre­at­ed a new cin­e­mat­ic vocab­u­lary, and he’s moved beyond the expec­ta­tions of his fan base. He’s putting this out there to change the shape of the land­scape for good. Maybe it’ll die on its feet. But then death is the road to awe.

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