The Fountain - "Darren Aronofsky. The Fountain."

The Fountain

Darren Afonofsky

2006 - Story, Screenplay,
Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Plot Outline:

Spanning over one thousand years, and three parallel stories, The Fountain is a story of love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence in this world. “ imdb.com

Review - By Jeff Friedberg

Unquestionably Darren Aronofsky is a genius—but he’s an artistic genius, which is different, much edgier.

There is nothing in this work that is not brilliantly symbolic of something else. Soft orange electric lamps are like the lambent torchlight of other sequences in past eras. A great mystic tree is the Tree Of Life, the World Tree of many diverse mythologies. Snow is death and a harbinger of it. A story is written in an old fashioned notebook that must be unbound to be opened and read, just as life is a mystery to be unlocked and read. Even a monkey named Donovan has his use (Donovan's Brain, 1953.) You get the idea.

Look for the magnificently layered feast of imagery, symbolism, and mythology Aronofsky serves up. It is as thrilling and emotionally overwhelming as its exquisitely unresolved musical score, endlessly dark, poignant, forward-moving, unending.

The Fountain is a work in three acts, with three separate—yet blended—components in each act that are revealed simultaneously. A brilliant young scientist and researcher, Tom, seeks to conquer death in time to save his dying wife, Izzi; for him, “death is a disease” that needs to be cured. This is his life when it was ordinary for him, before passing over a threshold from which he can never return

In a harmonic insertion, his dying wife, Izzi, is writing a book with old time fountain pen and ink, a mystic Romance of love, conquest, and death that takes place in Spain during the Inquisition. All but the last chapter is finished, which she wants Tom to write after she’s gone, "Finish it..." is her recurrent refrain. Izzi's book serves as an explanatory supplemental structure, lattice, or parable for their mutual battle or acceptance of or against her own imminent death: she is resigned to death; he never can be.

Tom views this tragic love story from his present, his point of view, which appears to us as the future. Like pages turned back from the future, Tom, made immortal by the medicinal bark of the mystic tree, looks back on all this—his past ordinary life as a scientist researcher—his life and love with the now deceased Izzi. Also, from out of the future, Tom dreams his “role” as a character in Izzi’s book, a devoted Conquistador who battles death itself—and discovers immortality in a mystic Mayan Tree Of Life.

But Tom—reluctant here in the future—must eventually pass through a---to him---terrifying doorway of no return to achieve his Goal. He wrestles with his own imminent personal conquest of death here in the future, which is to receive death, by choice, like a gladiator sworn to his oath might receive death, not willingly, but with acceptance and duty.

This is a complex presentation. How does all this come about, movie-wise?

As the film plays through, Tom’s point of view shifts through time and space—and therefore reality—from his (futristic) present to his own past, but also through imagination and visualization as he reads Izzi’s book, which is another realm, of form and idea, where he is symbolized by the unnamed Conquistador.

In The Fountain, the Present is actually taking place only in the “futuristic” scenes, where Tom—immortal—is in a trans-stellar container, a “bubble” or egg that falls endlessly through space toward a dying star which will go nova. When Izzi died—four hundred years ago, Tom planted a seed-pod over her grave, which grew into a great mystic tree that numinously now holds her life force and soul. This is nuanced and foreshadowed frequently by The Tree Of Life theme that weaves through the movie—death and regeneration, a mythology of planting and harvest, not of the hunter-killer. Tom has that great tree with him in a star-craft which journeys now through space toward its dark destination.

Tom and his vehicle are meant to be reminiscent of the Star Child that awaited rebirth in the movie 2001. Tom's conveyance contains him and also the great tree that grew long ago and, Druid-like, drove its roots into the Under World of Izzi's grave. It now holds the life-force or soul of Izzi. Its medicinal bark, or her essence, is what keeps Tom alive, or progressing, through time as he journeys toward his destiny.

Izzi's ghostly leitmotif, admonishment and refrain to Tom, "Finish it," means: finish the story—finish your life with death, for Immortality is not Human.

Tom flashes back to a scene rerun where Izzi asks him to walk with her in the snow—death—which he refused to do the first time she asked him—in the beginning of the movie. Now, in the future, he chooses to finally take that walk with her into the white expanse of forever.

Now, here, in the 25th Century, Tom finally meets that destiny as he sails to the star, Xibalba—the Mayan underworld, which is another recurrent theme. Once Tom and the tree of life reach Xibalba, the star explodes, and Tom and Izzi (the Tree Of Life) are utterly uncreated—yet merge in cosmic completion, where they will not “live forever,” but, rather, will exist together for Eternity.

Eternity contains Forever within it, and is absent from both time and space. Therefore, they don't live for eternity, but they are together in Eternity, with the Great Source Of All Things.

The End.

Darren Aronofsky, The Fountain.

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