Where we're going, we don't need roads...

The movie-going public and critics are often at odds, but there can be few films that divided popular and critical opinion more passionately than Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain.

An ostensibly art-house film which saw massive international release (thanks to the star power of Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman), The Fountain baffled cinemagoers and critics alike with its abstract, existential plot and haunting imagery of trees, space, infinity and time.

The final film was a slimmed down version of a much grander, $70 million vision, which fell into development hell after Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett left the project and Warner Brothers shut down production of the film.

Despite rewriting the film to allow for a smaller budget of only $35 million, with a shooting schedule that was complete in 60 days, The Fountain is a film whose universal scale and incredible vision outstrips its tiny budget. The film tells the intimate story of surgeon Tommy Creo’s (Jackman) desperate attempts to save his writer wife Izzy (Weisz), who is dying from cancer, using a new treatment derived from the bark of a tree.

However, the love story between Tommy and Izzy takes on a universal scale, as the film also depicts Izzy’s book, in which a Spanish conquistador (Jackman) is charged by his queen (Weisz) to save his country by finding a mythical tree of life in the Mayan jungle, and a surreal futuristic storyline that sees Tommy travelling through space in a bubble shaped spaceship, which contains a garden and a dying tree.

Quite how these three storylines fit together is never made clear – something which drew strong criticism from critics, and audiences – but this is the film’s great strength, rather than its weakness. By failing to connect the plots, Aronofsky credits the audience with the intelligence to make up their own minds as to how to understand the film, allowing our perceptions to change with each viewing, as audiences gradually understand the intricacies of the film, and the themes of life, death, infinity and time that are layered throughout.

'We passed that nebula an hour ago'

Unlike David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky never leaves audiences hanging. Instead, he offers plenty of indications, or suggestions as to how the various plots might connect. The film is densely layered with images of nebula and the tree of life, which appear differently in each storyline, moving from clever metaphor to literal object and back again as the film’s storylines begin to interweave. It is these clues that suggest ways the three stories might connect, but it’s always left up to the viewer to decide exactly how, or even if, they do.

But it’s not just The Fountain’s plot which outstrips its meagre budget. Aronofsky paints the story of Izzy and Tommy on a giant canvas, which takes in Mayan temples, giant trees, the depths of space and exploding nebulae.

Aronofsky’s vision called for the use of as little digital effects as possible, which he achieved through the use of ‘macro photography’ – brewing chemicals and bacteria together and recording them at close proximity to create the vast, otherworldly effects of the Xibalba nebula seen in the space travel portion of the finished film.

Perhaps the film’s greatest triumph is the collaboration with Clint Mansell, the composer who produced the scores for Aronofsky’s Pi and Requiem for a Dream. Mansell teamed up with Scottish post-rockers Mogwai to create a score which manages to capture both the vast, universal scale of the film, the deeply personal nature of the relationship between Tommy and Izzy and the themes of life and death which run throughout.

Given the deeply ambitious nature of Darren Aronofsky’s low-budget, huge scale meditation on life, love and the fear of death, it’s hardly surprising that The Fountain wasn’t accepted by the multiplex masses.

However, anyone willing to look beyond the accusations of pretention will find a perfect, intimate story of love and loss, told on a gargantuan scale, with some of the most haunting and beautiful images and music to ever have been put to film.

Philip Reynolds