August 17, 2007

Movie Review - The Fountain

Review by Joshua Massre

The Fountain tells the story of a couple’s love for one another and spans over 1,000 years. Thomas, an animal research scientist, finds out his wife had cancer and sets out to find a cure for death. The three time periods interweave with one another seamlessly and blend together for an unexpected and unforgettable climax that will leave many people scratching their heads wondering what they just saw. This may seem like a simplistic description, but it is impossible to describe the intricacies of The Fountain, mostly because it is so full of intertwined plots that are so nonsensical unless they are meshed together the way that Darren Aronofsky manages.

Aronofsky had always been a little weird (his last movie, Requiem for a Dream, had a refrigerator talking to a Home Shopping Network addict) but this movie tops Requiem and Pi by a long way. His two previous films were small affairs grounded in reality and small in scale. They both had budgets of under $5,000,000, which is nothing in Hollywood.

The Fountain, however, had an almost $35,000,000 budget. It is amazing to witness how much can be done with this little of a budget (considering that the Transformers movie reportedly had a $200,000,000 budget and the special effects in this film look much better than Transformers does).

So how does the actual movie stack up? It has a killer cast including Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as well as a visionary director and writer in Darren Aronofsky. The film is surprisingly short, only 98 minutes. Usually this is a bad sign, a signal that the studio is trying to cut all of the fat out of a movie and leave only the plot points and action scenes in the movie (case-in-point: the new Fantastic Four film, The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). In this case though, it is simply because the movie moves at a breakneck pace and does not let up until the last five minutes of the movie.

By the time the credits roll, many people will be sitting scratching their heads, wondering what they just saw, and dismiss the movie as nonsensical garbage. Others will be staring at the screen and wondering what they just saw, but knowing that it was brilliant. The first reaction is the one that seems to be the consensus, which is truly a shame, because the movie is very subtle and requires the viewer’s full attention the entire time, and not just during the major plot points.

Overall, this movie will polarize the audience. If you step back and think about it, you may be one of the few people who thought that this movie was a piece of art.

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