She Blinded Me with Pseudo-Science!

The Fountain (2006)

Rating ... D+ (25)

For whatever little it's worth, The Fountain constitutes what is the most favorably I've ever looked upon one of Darren Aronofsky's films, though when the competition consists of the wannabe brainy dementia of Pi and the patronizing monotony of Requiem for a Dream, whose head-splitting trauma was the cinematic equivalent of writing lines (while getting punched in the stomach ... repeatedly), it's not difficult to see why. Fortunately The Fountain errs less towards the latter, Aronofsky's little Sonata in D Minor, where D stands for DRUGS OMG DRUGS ARE BAD GUYS! DRUGS WILL KILL YOU AND IF YOU TAKE DRUGS YOU WILL DIE, but the problem remains that all Aronofsky has really done with The Fountain is swapped out his suffocating sermonizing of Requiem for a Dream for Pi's bag of tricks, which basically consists of taking some elementary philosophical understanding (not mathematical babble this time but Buddhist theory - just look for the shadow Tai Chi) and not only poorly developing its importance and relevance to the story but also buffing up the film's credibility by inserting artificial contrivances that "verify" the film's logic. In this case, Aronofsky retains his idiotic fixation with geometric patterns, another hold-over from Pi (instead of having spirals laughably surface in the mise-en-scene - someone's tie, a Go board, etc - Aronofsky opts for some shapeless, explosion-esque form whose sole discernable purpose is to force audiences to create connections between objects, despite how logically there's no real similarity, in the hopes they'll interpret the gesture as meaningful, basically a charlatan's game of I-Spy - look, a nebula! A cell! A spikey acorn!), and also experiments with some new-age, chronological wankery. (The Fountain takes place in three seperate time periods - 16th, 21st, 26th century - and whether or not the two noncurrent eras are simply fictional fragments of the present one is deliberately ambiguous, presumably because the function of such a framework is to distract audiences from The Fountain's simplicity and childishness and delineate what is otherwise a straightforward story.) Aronofsky doesn't see fit to develop any character, insteading aiming at short-sighted displays of drama (Jackman smashes things when he's ang, er, ANGRY - multiple times, as though further displays of outrage actually serve to clarify the emotion), and as a result The Fountain wears thin even at ninety minutes, the last twenty of which slam in with melodramatic might on the foundation of Aronofsky's undeveloped, adolescent romance (characterized mostly by vague, meaningless dialogue - "Each moment ... inside and outside ... feels different!"), and serve only to demonstrate Jackman's acceptance of his wife's death and wrist-slap the prospects of eternal life. Because Aronofsky is so unwilling to invest in the characters that should be the lifeblood of his film, yet delights in the flashy shortcuts that serve as replacement pathos, it's difficult to interpret Aronofsky's over-ambition as anything other than a plea for attention. Either way, let's just hope he doesn't revert back to films about addiction.