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Let
There Be Light THE
FOUNTAIN: Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Story by Aronofsky
and Ari Handel. Cinematography, Matthew Libatique. Music, Clint Mansell.
Production design, James Chinlund. Starring Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz
and Ellen Burstyn. Warner Bros., 2006. 96 minutes. PG-13.
It's hard to follow up a film like Requiem for a Dream. Hyper-real, anguished, stunning and terrible to watch, Requiem is a piece of cinematic clockwork, its speeding frames laced together with obsession and need. If there is one theme connecting Requiem, director Darren Aronosky's first film, Pi, and his newest, The Fountain, it's that thread of obsession. Numbers, needles — now, it's nothing less than the search for immortality driving Aronofsky's characters. It sounds straightforward enough, but little is clear in The Fountain, with the exception of the film's beautiful, gilded lighting and sets and the many patterns of stars, circles and lines that appear everywhere, even on the glass door of a hospital room. Apartments, hospitals, medical laboratories, futuristic space-traveling bubbles: All seem almost to glow from within. The rare exceptions are the cold, harsh light of a snow-covered field, or the deep dark of a rain-lashed jungle. And once, the queen of Spain (Rachel Weisz) asks that the light be let in, but the bright sun only serves to give her face a luminous glow as she sends her conquistador (Hugh Jackman) to the new world in search of a tree she believes will grant eternal life. But is this queen's story real? Or is it something that exists only in the painstakingly handwritten book cancer-stricken Izzi (Weisz), in 2000, has been working on? Izzi's husband, Tommy Creo (Jackman), a medical research doctor, tests cures for brain tumors on monkeys, working so hard to cure his dying wife that he barely has time for her. Five hundred years in the future, a man now called Tom (Jackman, hairless) sits in the lotus position in a bubble he shares with a dying tree, drifting through space on a journey to the heart of a dying star, the death of which he believes will save the tree, which in turn will keep him alive. But will it bring Izzi back? The Fountain feels strangely like a set of nesting dolls that doesn't quite fit together. You sense that somewhere, the layers are bumping up against each other, and not in a comfortable way. Ideas loop and circle, phrases repeat, characters relive moments and the whole thing casts a spell that will net the willing into its strangely calm center. But what is Aronofsky getting at? His film dances around the simple and impossible desire to preserve the things we love, but it gives its heart to Izzi, who seems to read and write her way into overcoming her fear of death, of change. But if that's the film's heart, its muscle is formed from missteps born of hubris and from one man's obstinate desire to continue. In the future, the tree that Tom takes into space stands in for Izzi; visions of her, and that Spanish queen, come and go as they travel. "Finish it," whispers Weisz's voice, and Tom does, but maybe not as he thought he would. Did Aronofsky finish The Fountain, a film that began life as a big-budget spectacle starring Brad Pitt before scaling back to this more modest piece, as he meant to? It's hard to guess. But for beauty, for grief, for visual texture and a willingness to make such a strange, emotional, trippy film, Aronofsky deserves your attention. It's only his third film, after all, and if it seems strange that a director goes from the gritty darkness of Pi to the sharp bleakness of Requiem for a Dream to this shining, gorgeous, flawed piece of work, well, perhaps that's part of his point. Our overwrought passions and impossible goals are sometimes, inexplicably, our most attractive qualities — and his too.
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