The Fountain


The Fountain is a 2006 American epic science fiction romantic drama film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Blending elements of fantasy, history, spirituality, and science fiction, the film consists of three storylines involving immortality and the resulting loves lost, and one man's pursuit of avoiding this fate in this life or beyond it. Jackman and Weisz play sets of characters bonded by love across time and space: a conquistador and his ill-fated queen, a modern-day scientist and his cancer-stricken wife, and a traveler immersed in a universal journey alongside aspects of his lost love. The storylines—interwoven with use of match cuts and recurring visual motifs—reflect the themes and interplay of love and mortality.
Aronofsky originally planned to direct The Fountain on a $70 million budget with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the lead roles, but Pitt's withdrawal and cost overruns led Warner Bros. Pictures to shut it down. Aronofsky rewrote the script to be sparser, and was able to resurrect the film for $35 million with Jackman and Weisz in the lead roles. Principal photography began from November 2004 to February 2005, and mainly took place on a sound stage in Montreal, Quebec. Aronofsky used macro photography to create key visual effects for The Fountain at a low cost.
The film was released theatrically in the United States and Canada on November 22, 2006. It was a box office bomb, only grossing $16.5 million worldwide against a production budget of $35 million, and received generally mixed reviews from critics, but it has gained a cult following since its release.

Plot

Tomás Creo in New Spain fights a band of Maya to gain entry into a pyramid, where he is attacked by a Mayan priest. The story intercuts to Tom, a traveler in the twenty-sixth century who was tending a tall tree in a glass dome biosphere travelling through space, annoyed by a woman called Izzi. Finally, a third iteration, present-day surgeon Tommy Creo, is losing his wife Izzi to a brain tumor. Tommy is working on a cure using samples from a tree found through exploration in Guatemala, which are being tested for medicinal use for degenerative brain diseases in his lab. Izzi has come to terms with her mortality, but Tommy refuses to accept it, focused on his quest to find a cure for her. She writes a story called "The Fountain" about Queen Isabella losing her kingdom to the Inquisition and a commission given by her to Tomás Creo to search for the Tree of Life in the Central American forest in Mayan territory. As she does not expect to finish her book, Izzi asks Tommy to finish it for her. As they look up at the golden nebula of Xibalba, she imagines, as the Maya did, that their souls will meet there after death when the star goes supernova. She dies shortly thereafter and Tommy dedicates himself to curing not only her disease but death itself after seeing experimental success in reversing aging. His colleagues fear that this drive has made him reckless, but they support him in his scientific work and emotionally at Izzi's funeral. Tommy plants a sweetgum seed at Izzi's grave in the manner of a story she told him relating how a Mayan guide's dead father lived on in a tree nourished by the organic nutrients of the buried body.
In the Mayan jungle, Tomás finds that most of his fellow knights are exhausted and refuse to continue searching for the Tree of Life. After a failed mutiny and the death of their priest guide, he takes the few who remain loyal with him to a pyramid, carrying a ceremonial dagger. Once he arrives at the pyramid, the first scene repeats and Tomás engages in combat with the Mayan priest. Tom spends much of his time performing physical or mental exercises, including a form of meditation allowing him to perceive and interact with the past. In that past, Tomás is stabbed in the stomach but, just as the priest is about to kill him, he appears before the figurehead. The priest now believes Tomás is the "First Father" who birthed all life. Tomás kills the priest as a sacrifice and proceeds to a pool with a large tree, convinced this is the Tree of Life. Tomás applies some of its sap to his torso and is cured of his stab wound. He drinks the sap flowing from the bark. But in a reenactment of the Mayan creation myth recounted earlier, his body is turned into flowers and grass that burst forth from it and he literally gives rise to new life, killing himself in the process. In space, the tree finally dies just before the spaceship arrives at its destination, much to Tom's horror. A final vision of Izzi appears, comforting him in the face of his acceptance of death. The star goes supernova, engulfing the ship and everything within. Tom's body, engulfed by the dying star inside the nebula, is absorbed by the tree, causing it to flourish back to life. Izzi's apparition picks a fruit from the new tree of life and hands it to Tommy, who plants it in Izzi's grave, accepting her death and moving on.

Cast

  • Hugh Jackman as Tomás Creo / Dr. Tommy Creo / Tom the Space Traveler:
A 16th-century Spanish conquistador set out in the deep jungles of South America to find the elixir of life that was purported to come from the Fountain of Youth springing forth from a tree atop a Mayan pyramid, where he fiercely fought a Mayan high priest. In the present, a scientist discovers a South American tree with promising life-extending properties in an attempt to cure his wife of brain cancer. Five centuries later, a man journeys through deep space in a futuristic spherical spacecraft with a tree assumed to be the one Dr. Creo planted on the grave of his wife Izzi half a millennium earlier, heading toward a dying star believing its explosion will restore her. Jackman played all three characters in three interweaving narratives spanning a period of one thousand years, beginning in 1550 A.D.
A terminally-ill woman writes an unfinished manuscript titled "The Fountain" about a 16th-century Spanish queen held captive by a powerful Catholic priest, who sends her most loyal henchman to find a legendary tree she believes would free her and her subjects from the Inquisition. Weisz, speaking to The Guardian, shared how working with director Aronofsky, who was then in a relationship with her at the time of filming and release, was "very different to who we are around the house."
  • Ellen Burstyn as Dr. Lillian Guzetti: Dr. Creo's lead surgeon and colleague at the laboratory who was concerned with Tommy not spending enough time with his dying wife as he obsesses over finding an end to death
  • Stephen McHattie as Grand Inquisitor Silecio: His growing power and ruthless crackdown on the queen's loyal subjects, branded as heretics during the Inquisition, threatens the peace of her kingdom as he stages a coup against the Spanish queen
  • Mark Margolis as Father Avila: The Franciscan priest who discovered the secret path to the Mayan temple deep in the jungles of Guatemala where the Tree of Life was hidden
  • Cliff Curtis as Captain Ariel: Creo's fellow conquistador who believed that the quest to find the Tree of Life was a curse and was killed by Tomás in a fit of rage.

    Narrative structure

The three stories are interwoven with match cuts and recurring visual motifs; Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play the main characters in all three narratives. Whether the actions in these stories are actual events, or symbolic, is not clear: director Darren Aronofsky emphasized that the storylines in their time periods and their respective convergences were open to interpretation. The director has said of The Fountains intricacy and underlying message, " very much like a Rubik's Cube, where you can solve it in several different ways, but ultimately there's only one solution at the end."

Themes

In a 2012 interview outlining the path of life depicted, Aronofsky stated that "ultimately the film is about coming to terms with your own death" oftentimes driven by love. The film asks such questions as "What if you could live forever?" and depicts one man's journey to overcome death. Related to this path, Darren Aronofsky described the core of the film as "a very simple love story" about a man and a woman in love, with the woman's life cut short. The director researched people who were dying young, and learned from doctors and caregivers that such patients find new ways of coping. Aronofsky observed that the patients often die more alone because their families cannot recognize what happens with them, calling it "an incredible tragedy":
Instead of facing this tragedy in terror, she is coming to terms with what is happening to her... Many patients actually start opening up to the possibility of what's happening to them, but there's very little vocabulary to help them deal... We decided to expand it with this woman offering a gift to her husband as a metaphor that tells him where she's come to in her awe inspiring journey towards death. Hopefully through time he'll be able to understand it and basically get where she is.

The Fountains theme of fear of death is "a movement from darkness into light, from black to white" that traces the journey of a man scared of death and moving toward it. The film begins with a paraphrase of Genesis 3:24, the Biblical passage that reflects The Fall of Man. Hugh Jackman emphasized the importance of the Fall in the film: "The moment Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, humans started to experience life as we all experience it now, which is life and death, poor and wealthy, pain and pleasure, good and evil. We live in a world of duality. Husband, wife, we relate everything. And much of our lives are spent not wanting to die, be poor, experience pain. It's what the movie's about." Aronofsky also interpreted the story of Genesis as the definition of mortality for humanity. He inquired of the Fall, "If they had drank from the Tree of Life what would have separated them from their maker? So what makes us human is actually death. It's what makes us special."