The Fountain: Obsession and Mortality, and the Human Condition

I had forgotten how taxing watching The Fountain was. I came away from seeing it today with the feeling that I had been punched in the gut, like I needed to sit with it and let it settle for a while. Aronofsky movies tend to have that effect – most memorably, Requiem for a Dream, after which I sat, stunned, for a good ten minutes after it finished.

With Aronofsky’s new movie, mother! (which I am super excited for!) around the corner, The Fountain came to mind. It is, in all likelihood, Aronofsky’s most polarizing film. I remember hating it when I first saw it. I think I was around thirteen at the time, and thought that it, while visually beautiful, was incredibly contrived and convoluted. I caught some of the meaning then, but I don’t think that it fully came across to me then.

As this blog evolves, I think you’ll find that this is a pretty common thing for me – I also hated Melancholia the first time I watched it, but with years of experiences and maturity it became, in my eyes, a masterpiece. With The Fountain, this came from a mixture of personal experience along with a natural progression of the way I watch and consume film.

The most basic way to summarize The Fountain is as a movie about grief and the process of acceptance. It follows several versions of the main character, Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman) and his terminally ill wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz), as Tom strives to find a cure for the aggressive cancer rattling her body. The Fountain, in the movie’s universe, refers to a book that Izzi is in the process of writing.

Much has been made of the plot of The Fountain, trying to show how, like Cloud Atlas, it is meant to show the same souls inhabiting certain people over the course of three periods, each 5o0 years apart. This is largely how I interpreted it years ago, and honestly is probably why I thought so little of it at the time.

The Fountain, however, is so much more than that. It is an enjoyable movie in its own right, but it also carries with it a great weight, and significantly more nuance than it has been offered in many of its reviews at the time.

This is not a movie about three timelines, or about how love transcends time, or how we can overcome death. It is a movie about obsession, and how truly fleeting life is. It is an intimate meditation on the nature of death, life, creation, and destruction.

The performances offered here are these actors at their bests. Each scene carries with a very real sense of grief, of sadness, of treating those who are alive as if they are not even here. Tom relentlessly pursues a cure for his wife’s cancer – in the process ignoring everything she tells him and wasting away the last moments of her life in his lab, rather than in his arms. No wonder the scene near the beginning of the movie where Izzi pulls Tom into the bathtub after discovering that she can no longer feel hot or cold, is so tender, so passionate, and so desperate. It shows us the depth of love in these characters – and is communicated beautifully through the actors.

The fear in Izzi’s voice. The body rattling sobs of Tom. These are familiar elements to anyone that has had to deal with the loss of one close to them. Tom’s path is familiar to me, as I imagine it is to anyone. Even at that young age when I thought this movie was not all that good, there was one line that stuck with me. Tom, at his wife’s funeral, can’t take the speeches and romanticizations of death any more, and blurts out, “death is a disease… just like any other. And there’s a cure… a cure. And I will find it.” It is what he has been pursuing without end in this entire movie. The ability to destroy and avoid the pain of loss.

But that isn’t how life works.

Thirteen-year-old me thought that was a profound line. I always carried with me a fear of death, a fear of the certainty of the whole thing, and a firm belief in the existence of immortality. Hell, I still believe that – or need to, I suppose. But the years have humbled me, for sure. I’ve seen the passing of my grandfather, in a long, drawn out affair, an experience I still carry with me in many ways. I’ve experienced a family member coming far too close to death for my liking with a heart attack. I’ve been introduced to the randomness of the whole thing, of the overwhelmingness of the whole affair.

Perhaps that’s part of why this film has become so much more meaningful in my eyes.

Izzi suffers from cancer, sure, but fundamentally death is just as much of a presence for any of us. There’s no reason we couldn’t walk outside tomorrow and be hit by a bus, or suffer a brain aneurysm, or get diagnosed with a terminal condition just like Izzi. And yet we keep on keeping on. We trust in our own immortality. We push aside any thoughts that we or those close to us are actually open to any harm. And if any of those people are – we simply trust that they’ll make it through. Lord knows I’ve been at that point where I simply trust in the science, where the full impact of something doesn’t hit me until I’m forced to face it. But this reliance upon control, upon knowing everything, being able to stop anything we want – this only brings hurt, confusion, pain. This only leads us to waste the precious moments we have left.

I think it is incredibly relevant that Tom’s group reveal they have the cure just as his wife passes away. His relentless pursuit may have borne fruit, but for what good? His entire driving purpose behind this research is gone. He doesn’t accept it easily – going as far as to assault a doctor in the process of trying to resuscitate his wife. But that is the purpose of him finishing the book, as Izzi asked of him. She wanted him to reach this catharsis – to let him go, to understand what she came to see.

And that is what we, the viewers, see in the form of the 2500 A.D. timeline. As far as I can tell, this is not to be taken literally, but is a representation of Tom’s mind. It is him trying to come to terms with the death of Izzi – hence the projections of both Izzi in present day and Izzi as the Queen of Spain to this traveler. It is Tom’s mind. It is the reason that the movie ends with Tom from 2500 being consumed by Xibalba, the nebula mentioned several times previously in the movie, and saying “I’m going to die!” with a laugh and tears. It is Tom learning to come to terms with not only Izzi’s mortality, but his own, most visibly captured in the last scene – him burying a seed above Izzi’s grave and, with a sense of finality and pain, saying, “bye, Iz.” It is final. It shows that the dramatic sacrifice of spaceman Tom was an analogy for the mental voyage of present-day Tom, and that he has come to accept, in a sense, that his wife is gone.

The first movie I saw after the passing of my grandfather – and the movie that honestly formed most of my interest in movies – was Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman had died a block over from me around the same time as my grandfather, so in my mourning process I wound up watching Synecdoche right around the time of my grandfather’s funeral and sobbing at it. Trust me, a Synecdoche analysis/review will happen, once I feel I have the ability to give it the treatment it deserves. But what Synecdoche and The Fountain share is that they both reflect on the impermanence of existence, and how we attempt to overcome that. In Synecdoche, the main character is a playwright who attempts to overcome death through his art, and is constantly questioning his own health. In The Fountain, we find a scientist convinced that he can beat death, and does so! but mere minutes after his wife passes.

Dread is the most fundamental of all human emotions. The inevitability and relentlessness of death is something that we all must face in our time. And honestly, I think it’s a big reason why The Fountain – and Synecdoche, for that matter – were not well received. They force us to look at something that we tend to go to movies to escape, the bitter, hard truth. They force us to think about the thing that comes after us late at night, those thoughts of, how many years do I really have left? Will I wake up one day and wonder where the years have gone? Could I die tomorrow? Could the people I love most in this world pass away before I even know it?

And that’s why this movie is a sucker punch. It brings up feelings I, and we, keep buried. It is subtle, sure, but it shoves in our faces the fact that we can’t spend our entire lives worrying about the infinite darkness that we will all one day face. We can’t focus on death forever. Because if we do, we will lose everything. Tom lost the last moments with his wife, even though he was fighting for her.

Sure, treasuring the moment is a trope. But it is only when Tom comes to terms with death that he is able to see what he should have done – gone and experienced the first snow with his wife, and spent more time with her, and simply existed with her, instead of chasing immortality. I am glad that I spent my grandfather’s last moments with him, talking to him, letting him know I was with him and that he was loved. For if I was simply off somewhere, researching endlessly and had to hear from a third party about all the different things that were happening, how would I have felt? I have carried for years a certain amount of guilt over not being there at the moment he passed, so just imagine I wasn’t there at all? Just imagine that I was Tom.

The acting in this movie was phenomenal. The visual effects are second to few movies that I have ever seen – this coming from a fan of cinematography. The soundtrack, made by Clint Mansell, is one of the best I’ve ever come across. Yet this movie goes so far beyond the technical aspects I’ve mentioned. It is a masterpiece which took me years to finally come around to appreciating. It is a dreadfully sad – and yet somewhat hopeful – picture. It is something I carried with me for years, until finally seeing again, and which has been ten times more impactful upon a second viewing. I look forward to more viewings – and more analysis, one day – of this. I could speak for hours on it.

But for now, take this out of it. I don’t really subscribe to the notion of “death as a road to awe,” as the movie promotes. But it captures the feeling of dread, of existential sadness, and of grief more clearly than any other movie I have seen so far. It is a movie that captures what it is to be human. It is peak Aronofsky.

It is a movie that has rattled me to my core, in a less noticeable way a decade ago and more directly this time around.

Life isn’t easy. But, like this movie, it is beautiful. And maybe, if we can find a certain beauty and creation in the flipside of life – death – we can learn how to live better.

I certainly hope so.

5/5