Dec 8, 2006
Darren Aronofsky is theoretically one of the most creative and talented directors out there. The Fountain, his latest cinematic effort, is the product of nearly a decade of work, attached and detached Brad Pitts, twenty something million wasted dollars, and about three tons of the most pretentious, self-indulgent wank I’ve ever seen.
The Fountain’s vague, forced narrative follows the lives of three separate men in three separate times as they fight to save the women they love:
1. Hugh Jackman as a conquistador fighting in the new world to bring Queen Isabella eternal life to save her from a flagellating, self-abusing inquisitor in counter-reformation Spain (who, by the way, comes out of nowhere and may represent something deeply significant, but is nonetheless inexplicable and randomly savage, which was actually pretty cool… but I digress). And after this conquistador is spared by a horde of Mayan warriors for no apparent or believable reason, he kills a dude with a flaming sword and eats the sap of Eden’s supposed tree of life, resulting in a series of plants sprouting from his guts. WTF mate.
2. Hugh Jackman, as a present day medical researcher who is seeking a cure for brain cancer by experimenting on monkey brains in order to save his dying wife. The premise behind this section is perhaps sound, but when you realize that she has mere months to live – something that is abundantly clear from the beginning, you twit, Aronofsky; the fact that her husband is doing research on a monkey are rather pointless since human cures and tests are most likely half a decade away. My stepmother is a genetic researcher, I know. So fuck you. Anyway, Hugh Jackman’s self-obsessed and desperate doctor is even angrier than Wolverine, and I half expected him to slap a bitch, claws fully extended, about eleven times in as many minutes, then pop outside and throw some shrimp on the Barbie.
3. Hugh Jackman as a pajama-clad, shaven-headed, tree-loving monk. You won’t believe how accurate this description is unless you see it for yourself. Also, he just so happens to be rocketing through the cosmos in a bubble, yes a bubble, accompanied by a tree. Oh yeah, and he meditates and actually floats. And yes, it looks like Aronofsky wants us to take him seriously as we look at a bald, monkish Hugh Jackman meditating while floating in a bubble in the middle of a supernova. I anxiously await news of Aronofsky’s checking into rehab for his ridiculous crack habit.
Beyond these believable and logically intertwined stories (I’m lying, it’s neither), Aronofsky seems to be presenting us with a treatise on dealing with guilt, death, and the path to awe – or enlightenment/peace. That’s a pretty neat idea. But is it an idea worth investing some fifty plus millions of dollars in? The man deserves a bitch slap, and so do the stars that carried on, alongside him. Several moments were fairly moving, mostly because Hugh Jackman is actually a fairly gifted man, who can cry hysterically with the best of them. I have yet to see Jackman smile, let alone laugh, in any movie, but I hope that someone decides to set him up with “Van Helsing 2: Van Helsinger: Return of Kate Beckinsale’s Bodice and Medieval Lycra Pants.” Rachel Weisz is left with little room to actually do anything other than seem like she’s well chuffed about the fact she’s accepted that she’s going to die, making her somehow a better person than all those around her. I would say she looks as hot as she usually does, but she spends most of the film portraying a woman in the latter stages of brain cancer, knocking her down a few notches on Maxim’s hottest 100 sluts of the year list.
Audiences may wrestle with what the film is about, or may draw their own conclusions, once they stop laughing at Jackman or awkwardly pitying Weisz, and that is all that one can hope they might gain. It does provoke some thought, which is more than Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny did, but not much more. Aronofsky’s symbolism is too obscure, and too abstract to be weighed down with narrative constructions, and as a result, it has not enough abstraction to be considered abstract art or experimental film, and it hasn’t enough sense in a story telling sense to leave audiences with anything more than a sense of bewilderment and empty feelings of sadness for a man who failed the same woman/tree three times over.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the screenplay for this movie made Brad Pitt sob hysterically after he was forty pages deep. While Mister Pitt may be ramming (or being rammed by) Angelina Jolie, he may as well profess to being an emotional wreck if this movie is going to make him cry. Perhaps he hadn’t gotten to the floating monk or stomach sprouting tree bollocks by that point.
In dealing with death as a means of creation and recycling matter and old life into existence, Aronofsky transcends the boundaries of any number of religions, his primary focus being an ancient Mayan belief in a mystical after life and the poly-religious tree of life. There – I said something clever and thoroughly valid. Well done, Darren, we can all do it, but most of us don’t lead movie-goers on with exciting trailers and the promise of elaborate millennia spanning romantic tragedies. I paid for that movie, you thieving bastard! Take us seriously, we’re an educated an intelligent audience. The barmy reviewers who liked this film are focusing on it as a beautiful work of cinematic art, and to an extent, it really is – with some splendid cinematography and some slick over cranked slow motion fire-wielding sword shots. But come on, please, you’re not too clever for your own good, you’re just trying to be.
This film ought to be dedicated to all the emo kids in high school who have painted their fingernails black and resentfully scrawl, “I am just so mad at my Dad,” on their skateboards.
FUCK.
Just thinking about that movie for this long has made me want to go and kick puppies at the animal shelter.
Next time I feel like I’m having a crack inspired fantasy about dying and being OK with it, I’m going to write a movie.
Then I’ll send it to Brad Pitt.
And he’ll cry like a bitch, and forever I will know. I made Brad Pitt cry.
OWNED.
The Fountain: A frigid and feeble phallus on a frosty morning out of a possible womb-raiding 10-incher.
