Only a truly gifted director can make a movie as flamboyantly bad as The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky's trippy, swooning triptych about a millennium-spanning quest for the secret of immortality. Originally planned as an expensive CGI epic to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, the film was scuttled several years ago when Pitt, perhaps belatedly recognizing its toxic pretentiousness, abruptly bailed just weeks before principal photography. Aronofsky persisted, though, in the time-honored tradition of filmmakers obsessed with foolhardy, grandiose dream projects, retooling the script slightly and scaling the budget down to a level commensurate with his second-string replacement cast, Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. The result, I must say, doesn't look terribly compromised — at the very least, it's plenty ponderous enough to confirm one's reluctant suspicion that some visions are better left unrealized.
Cross-cutting furiously from distant past to cutting-edge present to hallucinatory future, The Fountain subscribes to a notion of eternal recurrence so clumsily adolescent that its two main characters are assigned variations on the same name in each era. (To be fair, Aronofsky does suggest that two of the stories may simply be wish-fulfillment projections of the third.) Five hundred years ago, Queen Isabel (Weisz) sends a conquistador named Tomas (Jackman) on a sacred quest to locate the Tree of Life, the sap of which is said to have miraculous powers. In the present day, Tom (still Jackman), a research scientist, is desperate to synthesize his own miracle, as his beloved wife Izzy (Weisz) fights a losing battle with a brain tumor. And then there's bald yoga master Tommy (guess who), who, five centuries hence, whizzes through space-time in a translucent bubble that resembles a snow-globe diorama of the Garden of Eden.
Most viewers will need to stifle their laughter during the hushed futuristic sequences, which involve a lot of frantic digging through the soil and some goofy silhouetted exercises-cum-dance-moves. (I would pay a tidy sum to watch Brad Pitt watching this stuff.) But the film's modern-day love story, which serves as its emotional fulcrum, becomes its true Achilles' heel. Tom barks and broods, Izzy smiles beatifically en route to the grave, and their passion, which is meant to be violent enough to fuel centuries of angst, remains wholly theoretical, thereby distorting its sixteenth- and twenty-sixth-century mirrors into laughable funhouse parodies. The Fountain is a film of ideas that never quite succeeds in emerging from its creator's head. — Mike D'Angelo