The New Holy

I've written about the Fountain before – in another blog and in my review for Detour. But it's such an important movie to me that I've bothered to edit some of that material into a separate review:

In Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, Hugh Jackman plays three versions of the same soul. The first is Tomas, a 16th century conquistador on a mission to find the Tree of Life and, with it, save his country and queen. His relentless loyalty and refusal to accept any defeat, even imminent death, are themes he will stubbornly carry with him for more than a thousand years of rebirth. Of these we see Tommy, an oncologist obsessively trying to cure his wife’s cancer through experimental research; and Tom, an astronaut hurtling solo through space toward the golden nebula where he believes the soul of his dead wife can be reborn. The superficial differences between their times and circumstances create a relief by which we see their sameness. It's not a story about eternal love as much as eternal persistence; a devotion to illusion so strong it distorts the truth and stunts acceptance.

Owing to a seismic performance by Jackson and an ornate, breathtaking special effects approach that uses manipulated macro photography in lieu of CGI, The Fountain will likely be to film what Siddhartha was to literature – the definitive western poetry for eastern mysticism. But outside of its spiritual overtones, it works simply as a piece of fantasy eye candy because its gilded visuals are an end in themselves.

Hugh Jackman's performance is the next-level. It goes so far beyond the standard of the craft that it's not even fair to call it acting. It's more like becoming. He should win the Oscar for best becomer. It caused me to rethink the value of his profession and the possibilities of people at his wealth and status level. I am skeptical of actors–and millionaire artists in general–but then I watch The Fountain and I think, what do I want from art? And the answer is, I want this. Here is a celebrity working in an industry that's superficiality must be stifling to any kind of personal or artistic growth and yet, somehow, Jackman has access to the power and focus to enact the essential human drama. What could be more important art? It is simply beyond me how someone can pull that from themselves even once, let alone repeatedly, under the monotonous microscope of film production.

Though The Fountain is enjoying an after-the-fact buzz of web adoration, it was critically misunderstood and virtually ignored in its theatrical release. It's easy to see why the studio would have trouble promoting something so esoteric since the essence of movie promotion is the promise of something you've seen before (there is no marketing template for sci-fi Buddhist meditations that lure audiences with brand-name actors, and then confuse the shit out of them). So it’s ironic that a film about rebirth now seems certain to have a second life. (For evidence of the shift see metacritic.com where its composite score of critic reviews was 51, in contrast to its user reviews, which, buoyed by the DVD release, are up around 80.)

For all its abstractions, and a plot that ping-pongs seemingly carelessly through time, it has a linear story once you get your head around it. But these few plot strands are almost beside the point once the main character is revealed to be an abstraction of the self.

I've come to think of The Fountain as a new genre. It's not sci-fi, not surrealism–terms which only describe its style–but a mystical, symbolic work of such singularity and compressed articulation that it transcends the whims of popular culture and rises to the level of spiritual edification. I might be getting carried away here, but I want to say that it is a holy film. Maybe not to everybody, but to me. Popular culture is probably not the best place to put something holy–and it has been a failure by those standards–but I think it will have its day when people quit expecting from it what they get from other movies.