Why, I asked myself as The Fountain unfolded, does this movie inspire more irritation and impatience from me than anything else? It should work; all the pieces are there. And yet somehow those pieces have not been deployed in ways that click or take flight. For a movie that paints the screen with bold images and wants to be about one of humanity’s biggest and most persistent questions—the certainty of death and the cycles of life—it’s all so oddly synthetic and cold. We’re looking at filmmaking, not cinema or even storytelling.
And how I wanted desperately to speak well of this film. Darren Aronofsky, the director, was responsible for two back-to-back masterpieces: Pi and Requiem for a Dream, and had suffered terrible creative setbacks during the production of The Fountain. For a time it threatened to slide into the same limbo as the forever-missing final reel of The Magnificent Ambersons or the near-limbo of movies like El Topo, but he got it finished, got it released, and signed off on the final cut. Whatever is wrong with this film is, I’m sorry to say, entirely his fault. It is Aronofsky’s vision, no doubt, but so much so that all possible spontaneity and human warmth has been crushed out of it.
