‘The Fountain’ (2006)
It is sometimes hard to separate the actual doings of a film from the film’s publicity materials. With a writer and director like Darren Aronofsky (‘Pi’,'Requiem For a Dream’) who seems to pride himself on the rich, mythical, and often opaquely puzzling presentation of patterns in human behavior, achieving this separation is especially difficult.’The Fountain’ is a triptych bound together by the search for immortality as a means to preserve love. Interweaving stories tell the tales of a Spanish Conquistador searching for the secret to immortality, immorality that will free the Queen he loves from the bondage of the Papal Inquisition, in the form of the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden in New Spain; of a cancer researcher desperately trying to find a way to stop the growth brain tumors in monkeys fast enough to find a cure for his dying wife who instead finds a way to reverse brain aging; and of a mystic traveling through space with a tree that he not only loves but is dependent upon for continued life. [Read more →]
