For a film that flows through different eras, it’s pretty perfect that The Fountain unlocks in me a specific kind of time travel. I can close my eyes and warp back to December 2006 when I’m on winter break from college, a couple weeks past the November release date of the movie, and I’m sitting in a now-abandoned movie theater where I once worked as a morning janitor. My sneakers stick to the dried puddles of soda on the floor. It’s my third time watching the think-y sci-fi love story written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, and starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz on a nonlinear, millennia-spanning odyssey in search of eternal life. This time around, I’ve roped my twin sister into watching with me. Trying to watch, anyway.
A few rows behind us, a group of high school kids is not making it easy.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” one of them groans. Loudly.
My sister and I glance at each other, annoyed. We’ve asked them a couple of times—and high schoolers are scary, thank you very much—to keep it down because we are rule-following narcs. Their Mystery Science Theater 3000-like real-time takedowns have already inspired an older couple, the only other audience members at this matinee, to throw in the towel and leave.
Meanwhile on screen, Hugh Jackman is a Spanish conquistador cutting through the jungle. And a doctor in a research lab when he should be with his dying wife. And also a bald-headed astronaut talking to a tree.
Soon enough, a ghostly wail soars up over Clint Mansell’s string-heavy, rippling score. “I hate this moooovie.”
Yeah, I got the frustration. Then and now, after I don’t know how many watches and ugly-cries on my part later. At its simplest—and there’s no easy one-liner to encompass this 93-minute poem of a film—The Fountain is about one man’s quest to conquer death and save the woman he loves, set in three eras: 1500, 2000, and 2500. Maybe. The film overflows with everything from Mayan religion to the Book of Genesis. From Tai Chi to time-shifts. From the science of cancer research to the fantasy of a spaceship that’s a floating garden in a bubble rocketing towards a dying star. All leading up to perhaps the most batshit—and I say this with complete admiration—movie climax I can think of.
In short, the film breaks my heart and puts it together again, every time.
It’s worth mentioning the long road Aronofsky, who wrote the screenplay and hatched the initial story with Ari Handel, trudged down just to release The Fountain. True to form for most cult movies, the film absolutely bombed at the box office, bringing in $16.5 million, compared to its budget of $35 million. A miracle that the $35-million flick even saw the light of day after Warner Bros. pulled the plug on a previous $70 million version that had been in pre-production in Australia in 2002, with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett attached. Aronofsky flew to Australia to fire his crew of 300 in person. So when that big-budget version of The Fountain dried up, Aronofsky teamed up with artist Kent Williams to release a graphic novel “director’s cut” version of the story in November 2005 from Vertigo.
“All I can do now is hope you enjoyed it as much as we all have enjoyed the suffering and bliss of making it,” Aronofsky writes in the graphic novel’s afterword.
Which might as well be a map, like the one the conquistador follows, for viewers of the film. The bliss—that moment of awe when everything clicks together—is there. But you’re going to have to work for it.
Much like Cloud Atlas, the 2012 scifi odyssey directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer and based on David Mitchell’s excellent 2004 novel of the same name—The Fountain flips-off any sense of linearity. The film explores three narrative branches. In Spain during the Inquisition, Queen Isabel (played by Rachel Weisz, and clearly based on the historic Queen Isabella) sends conquistador Tomas Creo (Jackman) on a holy quest. Somewhere in the jungles of Central America is a sacred tree, the Tree of Life plucked from the Book of Genesis, which grants immortality to whoever drinks its sap. Tomas must find the tree and return to free Spain and the queen from a bloody coup. Then, she tells him, “Together we will live forever.”
The next branch jumps forward 500 years to a vaguely American setting. Izzi Creo (Weisz, again) is dying of brain cancer and the end is near, she knows. While others would crumble—her cancer researcher husband Dr. Tommy Creo (Jackman, again) certainly is—Izzi finds strength and solace in art. She’s writing a novel called The Fountain about (you guessed it) a Spanish queen and a conquistador. While gazing at a Mayan exhibit at a natural history museum, she finds comfort in the Mayan creation story of the First Father who sacrificed himself to make the world. “Death as an act of creation,” she characterizes the act, clearly moved. Tommy’s not so sure. Because “death is a disease,” as he snarls later. And he’s so close to a cure for Izzi’s cancer, thanks to a promising compound from a Guatemalan tree. But of course he doesn’t find the cure in time. And instead of spending Izzi’s dwindling days with her, he throws himself at his work.
Another 500-year leap sees a lone (Jack)man—named Tom in the screenplay and the film’s closing credits—traveling through deep space in one of the most memorable spaceships on film: A bubble containing a garden with an ancient tree. The tree seemingly sustains him and he talks to it like a lover. But the tree is dying and the only hope for bringing it back to life is nestled in the heart of a dying star.
Each thread, however fantastical, is anchored by solid performances from Jackman and Weisz. Jackman dances between fervor and faith as conquistador Tomas and Tommy Creo, charging a Mayan army head-on and railing against the death of his wife with the same defiance. Which is why his breakdown after Izzi’s death—Jackman heaving with sobs—and the gentle air of spaceman Tom stand out. Meanwhile Weisz glows in every frame: Her commanding poise as Queen Isabel. Her warm grace as Izzi, who exudes an enviable, gentle acceptance of life’s circumstances that I feel for about three minutes after practicing yoga before the surrounding world pummels me down again.
These threads are all twisted together, of course. Confusion overflows, with nonlinear sequences, odd cuts, and trippy moments that see characters in the wrong time periods. A spaceman in a university office. A dying woman in a hospital bed in a spaceship garden. A Spanish queen against a gold nebula. If this was a novel, many might bail a third of the way through. But take a cue from Izzi, smiling gently at Tommy, and asking, “Stay with me.” Even if it feels like you can’t get your head above the water at first, when that wave of realization hits at the end, the journey is worth it.
If all I watched and read were existentialist meditations, I don’t know how I’d get out of bed in the morning. I love a thriller. I love beach reads and commercial fiction and I’ve lined up for midnight showings of tons of big, ear-rattling blockbusters. Something about swing-for-the-fences sci-fi stories with emotional cores—one that offer a dialogue for those who are game instead of a passive watch—bowl me over every time, though. It’s that “holy shit” moment when the threads start coming together. Whether that cohesion comes after a few watches (or, hey, not leaving a theater when people behind you are being obnoxious), or sticking through a stretch of challenging prose, like the far-future sections of the Cloud Atlas novel. The confusion, the head-twisting floats away, if you want to put in the work. And by the time the credits roll, or you gobble up the last line of the book, you have to sit and breathe for a second as the whole journey washes over you.
Stay with me, Izzi asks Tommy in the film. Finish it.
Like Aronofsky in his graphic novel afterword, a moment like that is something I wish for the readers of my upcoming book, Welcome to Forever—itself a trippy nonlinear love story between two men in a world that offers a kind of immortality. A book that, I realized on my last re-watch, I never could’ve written unless The Fountain rearranged my head and my heart first.
It’s tempting to try arrange and separate the narrative threads of The Fountain—and indeed a fan-made version of the film recut into “chronological” order floated around the internet for a while. But that’s almost heresy, to crib a line from the film’s ruthless Head Inquisitor as he hunts down Queen Isabel. Even the trailer sets up the white lie that the movie actually skips through time. That it’s about reincarnated souls, and lives that span centuries, and magic trees. When the truth—made more moving because of the abstraction and the work to sift through it—is much smaller. And harder to swallow. Tommy’s wife is dying. And there’s just nothing he can do.
Forget Mayan temples and space-treks. The only journey is Tommy’s one of acceptance. And the same confusion that hits the audience—what’s going on? what does any of this mean?—mirrors Tommy’s as he flails against his grief. And tries not to drown.
The Fountain loves a symbol. Trees. Rings. Tree-rings and seeds and bursting stars and flowers bursting into creation. By the end, though, the symbol of a fountain pen washes away all the past and future fantasy with ink.
“It’s all done except the last chapter,” Izzi tells Tommy after giving him a fountain pen and a crystal jar of ink. A scene burned into my head, even with the exploding stars, and the blood sacrifices. “I want you to help me.”
“How?” he asks.
“Finish it.”
“I don’t know how it ends.”
“You will.”
Stay with me, Izzi asks Tommy again and again. Finish it, her words yanking him from his far-future fiction. Like, stay with this feeling, with this drowning, crushing grief. And feel it. And let it go.
I’m ready. I’m not scared.
The story of Tomas the conquistador is Izzi’s fiction. And Tommy wrote his own: Tom on his lonely journey through the darkness into the light. From grief to something close to grace as he realizes how precious life is because of its impermanence. Fitting that Tommy, a man of science, would look to science fiction as he tries to finish Izzi’s novel. To cast himself as someone who cured and conquered death, even if a little too late, and now he’s so close to resurrecting his love.
But if that imagined future is the truth? For a story filled with promises of paradise, a man alone for 500 years with nothing but his grief seems like the worst kind of hell.
Too much suffering. Too light on the awe.
Maybe there is a kind time travel in The Fountain after all, though, hinted by the final frames. A more mundane kind of magic that Tommy could never really prove, as much as he’s learned to feel it in his heart. Something he hopefully learned not long after laying Izzi to rest, or while she was still by his side. An echo of a scene of the two of them at dawn, tangled in each other’s arms in bed.
“Is everything all right?” Izzi asks.
A beat. Tommy nuzzles into her back.
“Yes,” he says. “Everything’s all right.”
Because, she told him earlier, I am with you. Look. I’ll always be with you.
