Fountain Heads

We watched the The Fountain (2006) because one of the nephews said something like, “If I had wanted to watch something off the wall, I’d have watched The Fountain”. I’ll take that as a recommendation.

The Fountain interweaves three stories, or one story over three eras. One is set in the time of the Conquistadors, when Hugh Jackman is searching for the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden (or the Fountain of Youth or something). He was given this quest by Isabella, Queen of Spain, Rachel Weisz. This might have been more interesting if it had been more than one or two scenes, filmed at night. There main story is set in modern times, where Jackman is a neurosurgeon whose wife Izzy (still Weisz) is dying of brain cancer, and he’s not handling it well.

The final story is set in a dreamlike future, where a bald Jackman is floating in space in a bubble that contains an old tree. This is my favorite - it is mystical and hallucinatory, and therefore fun. To tie these stories together, this space travelller might be the surgeon from modern day become immortal, or possibly the reincarnation of the other Jackmen. That would make the tree Weisz.

The fact that Weisz gets reduced to a tree in this phase is a bit of a giveaway. In the modern phase, she is mainly a manic pixie dying girl. She implores Jackman to walk with her in the year’s first snowfall, but he has to hang around in his man-cave lab and obsess about how to cure her. He even gets a little shouty about it. He’s kind of right though. Tests on a South American tree bark finally show that it can cure cancer, and just as he gets it to her - she up and dies.

But this is a Darren Aronofsky movie - you might not be watching it for the plot. It does have some beautiful visuals, done practically - stellar nebulae are created with photomicrographs of colored liquids, etc. The Cloud-Atlas-style intertwining of loosely related stories is interesting too. There were some interesting twists in the story - Weisz talking about how the Mayan hell of Xibalba was believed to be a certain star, which turned out to be the dying nebula that space-Jackman was visiting. And maybe the whole movie is the novel Weisz is writing, that Jackman has to finish when she dies. But the overall weakness of the story made this, for me, more interesting than great. Still glad we watched.