In our continuing series of ’47 Films to see before you’re murdered in your dreams’, we look at Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain.
Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is a conquistador invading an ancient Mayan… no wait, sorry he’s Buddha, he’s a big bald Buddha floating in a bubble and looking after a tree … no hold that thought, he’s a doctor, a doctor with no sense of humor, experimenting on a monkey called Donovan hampered by a dying wife (Rachel Weisz) who’s writing a novel with a fountain pen. Or maybe he’s all of these things. Or maybe…
Following a tortured production history, The Fountain premiered in 2006 at the Venice Film Festival and was roundly and horribly booed. So much so that when The Wrestler won the Leone d’Oro, Mickey Rourke said on stage that ‘last time Aronofsky was here he fell on his ass.’ And there is a lot that is wrong with the film. It is preposterous, silly, doesn’t make much sense and Hugh Jackman is a limited actor, shown up by some of Aronofsky’s most cloth-eared dialogue: ‘Death is a disease just like any other and I WILL find a cure.’ The scale of its ambition also leaves it open to cries of pretension, especially with the scaling back of its budget so everything looks like what it is, shot on a sound stage in Montreal. But all that aside, this is an enjoyably mad ride. The music by Clint Mansell is astonishing, one of the best scores of recent years, and Aronofsky is constantly inventive. This is the Tree of Life as a graphic novel. There are moments where you’ll laugh at how ridiculous it is and other moments you might find yourself quite bizarrely touched.
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