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Three yarns in the fountain

A spiritual trip around a tree is stumping
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 7th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The way we were ... and will be. Love transends time zones in The Fountain.
Darren Aronofsky’s latest film appears like a heartfelt pastiche of his favorite films and books. It’s a spiritual smorgasbord of rich side dishes (a salver of Kabbalah here, a platter of Zen Buddhism there), garnitured with dollops of Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Silent Running, none of which share the same plate successfully. In short, it’s classic New Age.
The Fountain offers such a store of images and references that it can never quite cohere into anything remotely resembling an articulation of a philosophy. And so it becomes a scrapheap, though an interesting one.
The film interweaves three stories all set in very different worlds: a fictive past, the physical present and somewhere on a metaphysical plane. The present finds oncologist Dr. Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman) racing to find a cure for brain tumors, as his wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz), is suffering from one. Experimenting on a poor troop of rhesus monkeys, he discovers that a strange bark shard from a mysterious tree in Guatemala might be the answer.
Yet, until the results on the monkeys are solid, Izzi continues to decline. She uses her remaining time writing a fanciful novel about Queen Isabella of Spain dispatching her conquistador lover off to the new world to find the “tree of life.” Izzi gives this unfinished manuscript to Tom in hopes that he might finish it when she is finished. While reading the novel, Tom slips into a reverie — not an unusual state for him.
The conquistador is named Tomas (Jackman again), while Isabella is, of course, Izzi (Weisz). In this otherworldly Spain (an affair by the fanatically Catholic Isabella would certainly have come as a shock to King Ferdinand), Isabella seems to be ruling alone, and very much beyond the pale of the Inquisition. Her lover Tomas is dispatched to the new world to locate the rumored, storied tree. Upon his return, she promises to be his “Eve.”
The Fountain

Directed by Darren Aronofsky
With Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Ellen Burstyn

Can this tree of life be the one at the center of the mythical Garden of Eden? Furthermore, can this be the same tree that is producing bark fat with medicinal properties? And what to think of Dr. Tom’s last name, Creo, which is Spanish for “I believe”?
Interspersing these narratives is a metaphysical space tale. Tommy (Jackman), a sage of sorts, tends the dying tree of life within an orbital bubble heading toward a distant nebula that features prominently in Mayan lore. The purpose of this trip will be delivered in chunks of exposition by Izzi in the present day.
Unfortunately, the task of balancing these three very different stories overwhelms the director. In his attempt to tie the three strands together, Aronofsky falls into all of the same traps that writer Michael Cunningham recently met in his disappointing trilogy of similarly branching tales, Specimen Days. There are great stabs at depth, but the whole reeks of vagueness and contrivance.
As the actors are merely pawns for a confusing spiritual travelogue, we cannot expect much. Jackman suffers and sobs manfully, Weisz is wistful, and Ellen Burstyn pops up in the present time to exude maternal concern.
Amid the tai chi trappings and yoga exercises, there are hints lurking in the corners of this saga of things that might have been interesting to explore, had Aronofsky’s focus been more centered. The idea of a life-giving tree, like trinities, features in many different mythologies. But, as imagined by Aronofsky, it bears a more striking resemblance to Yggdrasil, the “tree of the world” in Norse myth.
Indeed, the three stages of Tom’s experience match the attributes of the Norns, the three Norse Fates, or “Weird Sisters,” who inhabited the base of Yggdrasil: Urd, or “Fate” (the Spanish tale); Verdandi, or “What is emerging” (the present); and Skuld, or “Debt and Necessity” (the space yarn — “yarn” being an apposite term, as the three sisters, like their Greek counterparts, were spinners and weavers).
Each viewer, it seems, is welcomed by Aronofsky to make of this spiritual quest what they will — which is terribly generous, but makes for poor storytelling. In the end, Aronofsky leaves us intrigued but hardly enlightened.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (7/03/2007):

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