With Darren Aronofsky's latest film, "The Fountain," this director has done something uncommon among the filmmaking community: he has reinvented himself.
Directors have traditionally sought to carve themselves a certain niche. After several movies they develop a reputation for a particular genre or a particular filmmaking style. Akira Kurosawa crafted samurai epics. Martin Scorsese shoots hard-boiled gangster flicks. M. Night Shyamalan weaves cryptic thrillers.
These directors may occasionally take up an unfamiliar genre. But the essential manner by which they direct, shoot and edit their films remains the same. Aronofsky doesn't care for this auteur trend and, as "The Fountain" demonstrates, deliberately disregards it.
Viewers will be most surprised to discover that "The Fountain" bears little, if any, visual resemblance to the director's previous two works, "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream."
Gone are the quick cuts, the schizophrenic pacing and the hip-hop montages. In their place Aronofsky utilizes restrained camera movements, longer takes and a more thematic color palate to distinguish between parallel storylines (let it be stated that Aronofsky is often intentional in his creation of confusing plots).
At a Q-and-A session following the press screening, Aronofsky said that this film should feel like watching science-fiction literature. Readers, or viewers in this instance, are placed amid confusing circumstances. Only when the second act rolls around do they begin to orient themselves and understand how the storyteller arrived at his initial scene.
So for those who either don't like surprises or can't stand being confused in the theater for more than 10 minutes, here's the synopsis: Tom (Hugh Jackman), a diligent scientist, works to discover a cure for brain cancer. His wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz), has been diagnosed with the disease. Tom continues to labor, as his prospects for unearthing a cure are promising but still uncertain.
Izzi wishes her husband would stop working so hard. She's come to terms with her approaching death and wants Tom to understand it as well. Instead of worrying, she asks him to read the story she has been writing. Tom agrees and picks up the large, leather-bound book one night.
He's so enthralled by the story that he reads for most of that night. It's about a dogged conquistador who wants to be forever united with the Queen of Spain. The Inquisition, however, threatens to break their mortal ties. The conquistador is told that a solution to his and Spain's problems lies amid Mayan ruins.
As he continues reading, Tom discovers that the book has no final chapter. "You must write it," Izzi says. And so he does.
What Tom writes is not a science-fiction story of laser guns and outer space. Aronofsky fails to find interest in these images. Exploring the inner space, the human mind and its acceptance or rejection of certain inevitable processes is much more fascinating, he said.
As a result, the film's space sequences evoke the wonder of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Jackman's alter ego flies through space encapsulated within a transparent bubble that also houses a dying tree, while golden nebula clouds swirl around.
These clouds, however, are not rendered with computer graphics. They actually consist of footage provided by an Oxford scientist who films microorganisms. The footage was manipulated in a computer and then placed into the space sequences.
What does this tell viewers about Aronofsky's film? That it has a graceful, even beautiful, way of allowing them to examine the uncertainty of the afterlife, the human desire to cement all things that are so obviously transient and the strange, almost child-like manner by which some accept their deaths. Only later does the audience find that these apparently larger-than-life questions are all understood through microscopic answers.
If Aronofsky has preserved one thing from his previous filmmaking, it's his exploration of man's desire to connect to something greater, something all-encompassing and powerful. In "Pi," math was that connection; in "Requiem," it was drugs. In "The Fountain," it is eternal life, investigated so considerately that people leave the theater not understanding any sort of greater connection but wondering why it is that we yearn for one.
