Darren Aronofsky is the most audacious filmmaker of his generation — his movies range from relentlessly challenging to nearly incomprehensible. But he’s paradoxically managed enough mainstream success to continue attracting top talent and to regularly appear on award season red carpets. Most recently, Aronofsky’s The Whale (2022) saw Brendan Fraser win the Oscar, Critics’ Choice Award and SAG Award for Best Actor. But the film’s depictions of obesity and the sentimentality of its script divided critics and audiences.
These split reactions are to be expected from a filmmaker whose debut feature, Pi (1998) is an unrelenting psychological thriller about mathematical number theory, the Kabbalah, Wall Street, sex and spirituality. It ends with the protagonist driving an electric drill into his temple. Or does it? From the very beginning, Aronofsky isn’t for everybody. The director achieved more mainstream success with The Wrestler (2008). And his masterpiece, Black Swan (2010) opened the Venice Film Festival to an extended ovation, and won Natalie Portman an Academy Award for Best Actress. But just when he was positioned to cement his place in the canon, Aronofsky improbably delivered a science fiction take on the biblical story, Noah (2014). He followed that film with mother! (2017) — possibly the most off-the-rails psychological thriller of all time.
Classic Aronofsky.
Before mother!, the auteur’s craziest movie was an epic romance called The Fountain (2006). The film scores an almost perfectly predictable split 53% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes with Roger Ebert calling Aronofsky “one of the rare originals among the recent class of new directors” before relenting that the film is probably not a success “for most people.” The Fountain focuses on Dr. Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman) and his wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz). Izzi is an author dying from a brain tumor. Tom is a surgeon who is desperate to save her life by synthesizing a cure from the bark of a tree found in Guatemala. Rachel is trying to finish a book about a Spanish conquistador named Tomás Verde who is sent by Queen Isabella to Central America to search for a mythical Mayan Tree of Life. Izzi’s book is titled, The Fountain and Jackman and Weisz also play the conquistador and the queen. Tom ultimately writes the final chapter of Izzi’s book in which a 26th century astronaut named Tommy is traveling through space inside a transparent sphere. He’s taking the Tree of Life to the Xibalba nebula – the Mayan origin of the universe. Space Tommy is an amalgam of Tom the surgeon/author-of-the-book’s-last-chapter and the Tomás character created by Izzi. The Tree of Life, relocated to the sphere/ship, contains the spirits of both Queen Isabella and Izzi. Jackman and Weisz also portray this iteration of the couple.
The Fountain jumps back-and-forth between these characters and their story lines to tell a tale about love and mortality. It blends a costume drama, realist cinema and mind-blowing science fiction into a film like a hall of mirrors. The central story is told through intimate scenes in quiet closeups, but the fictional scenes shimmer with sumptuous visuals from swashbuckling in the jungle to swooshing across the galaxy. I’d bet that most of The Fountain’s cult of true believer fans were seduced by James Chinlund’s production design and Matthew Libatique’s wildly original and varied visual stylistics before they fully understood all the poetic connections between the movie’s story lines. The Fountain doesn’t look like any other movie. Its go-for-broke style and hallucinatory editing caught me by surprise the first time I saw this film. It’s undeniably that Aronofsky has a vision here, and viewers who go with The Fountain’s flow will find its story mostly making sense by the film’s final, fantastical frames.
Whether you love The Fountain or you only know the film by its infamous reputation, don’t miss the chance to see it projected on 35mm film at The Belcourt on Sept. 6 at 8 p.m. Go to www.belcourt.org to watch the film’s bonkers trailer and buy your tickets.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.