A Fount of Nothing

A few years back, I remember seeing the trailer for writer-director Darren Aronofsky's sci-fi opus, The Fountain. It looked fantastic, and yet I never did get out to the theater to see it. Recently, I decided to catch up with it on Blu-ray.

As promised in those trailers, this movie looks fantastic. While it was by no means a cheap movie to make, it was produced on a fraction of the budget that major Hollywood effectaganzas have to work with. Here, it's clear that the artistic and creative people involved did more with less, and made it appear that every last dollar was visible on the screen. If you've seen What Dreams May Come or The Lovely Bones, or another such movie that is a feast for the eyes, we're talking about that level of eye-popping awe, and then some.

And like those other movies, we're talking about something that is lacking in other aspects of the piece. In fact, this movie is practically void and bankrupt in every other aspect but the visuals. The story is a defiantly non-sensical interpolation of three timelines: a 16th-century conquistador goes on a quest for his beautiful queen; a modern-day experimental doctor searches for a cure that will help his beloved survive a terminal disease; and... well, I guess some time in the future, a zen master is flying through space in a transparent bubble with a giant tree that contains the soul of his departed love, looking for suicide/rebirth in a distant nebula. I think.

Narratively, love is link between these disparate threads. They're connected more by actors Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, who embody characters in the different time frames. But any connection between them -- both as echoes between stories, and between the characters themselves within any one given story -- feels forced and superficial. No true emotion lands in any of the time frames, and all the jumping around between stories thwarts any momentum the story tries to build in connecting with the audience.

The actors try hard to elevate the experience, screaming, shedding tears, pouring their hearts onto the screen, but it all feels empty and unnatural, when it's not downright off-putting and confusing. The movie is just a series of gorgeous paintings brought to life, and would have been far more effective in the static, non-literal, non-narrative medium.

I found myself bored stiff long before the credits arrived, and feeling that anything I was going to get out of the movie would have been obtained in the first 10 or 15 minutes or so. It was a waste of time to sit through the rest. The Fountain gets a D-.