The Fountain reviews

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Post by Sonic Youth »

It's a write-off.

(And this reviewer is worse than Honeycutt.)


The Fountain


By Ray Bennett
Hollywood Reporter



VENICE, Italy -- Early in "The Fountain," writer-director Darren Aronofsky's flatulent dissertation on the benefits of dying, someone says, "Death is the path to awe." Aw, shucks, isn't that what suicide bombers are led to believe?

Terrorism isn't on the filmmaker's mind, though. Aronofsky wants us to believe in a story about seeking the fountain of youth that covers three incarnations from the days of Spanish conquistadors to the present day and forward to the 26th century.

It has big names in Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Ellen Burstyn; fantastical sets featuring Mayan warriors, the tree of life and a bubble space ship that travels amid the stars; and a frame of reference that draws from the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. There's a biblical puzzle that needs deciphering, so if Warner Bros. Pictures in the U.S. and 20th Century Fox internationally can somehow tie a "Da Vinci Code" reference into their marketing, they might snag a quick boxoffice return. Otherwise, "Zardoz" anyone?

It might all be the fevered imagination of a medical researcher named Tommy (Jackman), whose gorgeous wife, Izzy (Weisz), has terminal brain cancer. He doesn't want her to die, naturally enough, and he thinks he might be able to prevent it if he can just get the right treatment for her.

He and his team are working on curing brain tumors, so he's in with a chance. Their work is on chimpanzees, though, which means he can just about get away with using an untested compound on an old chimp named Donovan, whereas he wouldn't be allowed to do that with his wife.

The compound has been brought back from the rain forest where in a previous life Tomas was a Spanish soldier trying to save Queen Isabella from wicked inquisitors. The Inquisition held that most people were sinners and headed straight for hell anyway, which lacks awe in any helpful sense.

When he's not being Tommy or Tomas, Jackman morphs into the future as Tom, an astronaut who resembles David Carradine in "Kung Fu" but without the pigtail. He wafts about in a bubble space ship and loiters near a large tree, the sap of which he hopes will save not only Queen Isabella but also Izzy.

His wife, meanwhile, has written a book (in perfect handwriting with no mistakes) about the Mayan connection between the tree of life and a nebula in space that, when it dies, brings about all kinds of new life.

The thing is, Izzy has come to accept that she's dying and is rather looking forward to it. There's lots of sonorous violin music to underline the wisdom of this, though it doesn't keep Tom from poncing about doing tai chi and yoga in a desperate attempt to find her a cure.

Jackman does everything required of him, and his range is quite admirable, while Weisz, who has nothing to prove, does looking gorgeous very nicely.

There seems to have been a missed opportunity with Donovan the chimp, who recovers nicely from his tumor. No awe in death for him. Pity they don't let him sing "Mellow Yellow," though.
"What the hell?"
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Post by Mister Tee »

ScreenDaily. Not at the Southland Tales level of Variety, but certainly not good.


The Fountain

Lee Marshall in Venice 04 September 2006

Dir: Darren Aronofsky. US. 2006. 96mins.

Something of a feature-length New Age doodle, The Fountain will alienate many of those who were turned on to indie director Darren Aronfosky by his quirky debut Pi and its follow-up, the drug-fuelled cinematic opera Requiem For A Dream. Threading its epic love story through three time zones – the years 1500, 2000 and 2500 – his latest work is a visual and aural trip that lets its symbolic ambitions choke and finally suffocate its dramatic impact.

As such it’s one of those works guaranteed to split audiences down the middle: anyone with an aversion to woolly pop-Buddhist philosophising or who has a well-honed sense of the ridiculous is likely to pass the point of no return and lose patience with the whole exercise well before the end. Warner, which releases the film in the US on Nov 22, is likely to face something of a struggle (certainly if the chorus of boos that the film received at its Venice press premiere is anything to go by). Fox, which distributes The Fountain overseas (Nov 8 in France, Jan 18 in Germany and Feb 16 in UK among others), may similarly find reaching audiences tough going, not least because this has the look of a DVD shelf-sitter.

In Hollywood script terms, The Fountain is not so much a three-act film as a film of three final acts. In the contemporary timeline, Hugh Jackman plays Tommy Creo (“I create” in Latin), a cancer research scientist whose struggle to find a miracle cure has become all the more urgent because his wife Izzie (Rachel Weisz) is dying of a brain tumour.

Jackman is also Tomas, a Spanish conquistador devoted to Isabella, his queen – also played by Weisz, in ethereal, front-lit, Cate-Blanchett-in-Lord Of The Rings style – who sends him on a mission to the Mayan heartlands of Central America to discover the mythical Fountain of Youth.

Finally, Jackman is also Tom, a bald 26th-century astronaut-hermit, who spends a lot of time in the lotus position and has his very own Tree Of Life on his raft-like spaceship.

Aronofsky has a prodigious visual imagination, and we are initially dazzled by the sheer look of the thing while trying to work out the connection between the three stories, which dip in and out of one another in a way that sometimes illuminates but more often than not frustrates.

The pared-back palette created by Aronofsky and faithful cinematographer Matthew Libatique stress earth colours, golds and yellows and greens; and textures of skin, leather, metal and bark are captured in ravishing shallow-focus detail.

Camerawork, lighting and production design help build a dream-like fantasy world that, particularly in the future scenes, is somewhat reminiscent of What Dreams May Come, but here CG tricks are kept to a minimum (the list of carpenters and sculptors in the final credits fills two whole screens). Images of distant nebulae, what appears to be cells under the microscope and womb-like tunnels are spliced into the action in a more mellow version of the jagged editing which was the director’s trademark in his first two features.

But technical bravado is not enough to save a film that goes dramatically mushy well before the 60-minute-point before finally tipping over into absurdity. Though Jackman’s intense performance, and his character’s despair at his wife’s imminent end, is always believable and often affecting, emotional engagement is squeezed out of us by Aronofsky’s po-faced insistence on the big cosmic, symbolic messages he wants the audience to take home.

Comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey will undoubtedly be made but are way off the mark: for all its symbolic apparatus, Stanley Kubrick’s future vision was a film of great emotional subtlety – and The Fountain is not.

The soundtrack, by long-time Aronofsky collaborator Clint Mansell, is a long, atmospheric cosmic elegy, much of it played by modern classical group the Kronos Quartet.
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Post by Mister Tee »

Ouch.


The Fountain

By LESLIE FELPERIN, VARIETY

Backburnered four years ago after original star Brad Pitt pulled out, then long in the making, "The Fountain," third feature by one-time wunderkind Darren Aronofsky ("Pi," "Requiem for a Dream"), made more of a splatter than a splash on Venice's Lido with its world premier. Greeted by booing at its first press show, pic's hippy trippy space odyssey-meets-contempo weepy-meets-conquistador-caper starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz suffers badly from a trite, turgid script and bears all the signs of edit-suite triage to produce a still-incoherent 95 minutes. A gush of negative word of mouth will keep b.o. figures down to a trickle.

Overpraised for the then-hip, now-dated use of pseudo-science in "Pi," and for the visual excess he deployed in the grungy "Requiem," helmer Aronofsky, has been attached to and then detached from various big-budget studio projects over the last few years, including "Batman Begins" and "The Watchman." "The Fountain," written by Aronofsky and based on a story by him and Ari Handel, shows onscreen all the wear and tear of a personal project that has suffered from production fits and starts and has reportedly been cut down from a longer running time to a still tedious and repetitious hour and a half.

Plot interleaves three stories in different time frames, and switches throughout somewhat abruptly between them, although auds can parse which is going on when by paying attention to how much hair star Hugh Jackman is sporting at any one time.

In the 16th century, a bearded and long-locked Jackman plays a Spanish explorer Tomas, despatched by Queen Isabel (Rachel Weisz) to the New World to find no less than the Biblical Tree of Life itself whose sap bestows immortality. In Central America, Tomas must battle mutinous underlings and assorted growling, warpainted Mayan extras to get to a pyramid that hides the tree whose powers produce floral special effects that Tomas wasn't expecting.

Turns out latter storyline is the plot of "The Fountain," a novel being written in cursive hand in the present, or near-present day by Izzi (Weisz again) who is married to Tommy (Jackman again, this time sans beard). Izzi has a terminal brain tumor which Tommy is working full-out to find a cure for via experimental surgery on monkeys, assisted by a team of gown-and-masked supports without personalities of their own. Only other character to make much of an impact is Dr Lillian Guzetti (Ellen Burstyn, lead in "Requiem"), the head of the research facility who is wheeled on from time to time to warn Tommy he's working too hard and getting sloppy. Compound extracted from a Guatamalan tree may offer a cure or at least some kind of miraculous healing power.

Last plot strand shows a now-completely bald Jackman, called Tom Creo per press notes, living inside a clear bubble that's traveling through space towards the Xibalba nebula, an astrological body believed by the Mayans to be the location of the underworld. Supposedly it's the 26th-century, and Creo's craft is driven by mind-power -- or, perhaps more precisely, screenwriter's whimsy -- alone. His only company is a nearly dead tree from whose bark he gains sustenance, while he spends his days reliving memories from the 21st century of Izzi, and occasionally levitating around in the lotus position.

Visual effects, credited to a slew of different companies in end credits, are indeed striking with their nearly 3-D layers of golden haze. However, ultimately segment looks like a remake of the worm-hole section of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," but one produced by makers of instructional videos for beginning yoga students.

More problematic is fact that it's hard to muster much engagement with the characters who are so sketchily drawn. Izzi, for instance, is little more than a beatifically smiling presence. Weisz admittedly looks cute and pixie-like with a short-cropped hairdo, but even though she's now Aronofsky's real-life partner he hasn't given her much of a real role here. Charismatic Jackman and his chiseled cheekbones does his best to carry the film through its many lulls, but it feels like a lot of time is spent watching him cry or trashing offices in frustration.

No doubt filmmakers' intention was to celebrate a love that transcends centuries, hence repeated use of lines, scenes and motifs. In the end, however, the effect is just monotonous, especially given overuse of Clint Mansell's mournful orchestral score, slathered over scenes throughout as if in the hope they'll paper over the plot's cracks.

Nevertheless, with very savvy marketing pic might yet find a niche audience, especially with softer-hearted femme viewers who will groove to pick's rich costumes and honeyed tones.
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