However, if you do live in a jurisdiction where such recreational pharmacuticals as LSD, mescaline, and the like are legal, I recommend that you take them before you see the film. The visuals are perfect for it.
Warning!!! Raw, naked, throbbing spoilers to follow!!!
Back out now, you’ve been warned.
Okay, the trailer for the film made it seem like there’s 3 different storylines going on in the film, with the same characters in all of them. While that’s accurate, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Comments I’ve seen about the film have been either in the “Huh? I don’t get it.” category or “Wow! Mindblowing!” so I was excited to see the film, figuring that any film which could garner such responses had to be good. The Fountain, however, is not. (It didn’t suck as hard as some of the other films I’ve seen this year, but it is nowhere near my top 10 films of the year. Not even close.)
In a nutshell, this film feels like it was concieved after someone spent an acid trip watching Jacob’s Ladder, Altered States and reading Carlos Casteneda (or The Celestine Prophecy, for you young 'uns.). The gist of the story is that Hugh Jackman is a cancer researcher, desperately trying to find a cure for the terminal cancer that his wife, Rachel Weisz, has. Rachel is a writer, working on a novel called, The Fountain. It tells the story of Isabella (played by Rachel), queen of Spain, who sends the conquestador Tomas (played by Jackman) to the Americas to find the fountain of youth (there’s brief mention of an Inquisitor who’s after the queen, but not much happens with this story line). Jackman also has dreams of himself, shaved head, floating in a bubble in space, with a giant, old tree. In these dreams, he’s conflicted, and haunted by a voice who says, “Finish it.” The film rotates fairly freely between these storylines, and each one of them is filled with heavy handed symbolism.
Jackman tries out a botanical chemical on a research monkey (over the objections of some of the staff, and the administrator who makes the claim that by doing such, he’s risking having the NIH pull their funding), then heads home, where Rachel shows him a nebula through a telescope (and the geek in me has to point out that the telescope she’s using wouldn’t be powerful enough to show the nebula in the kind of detail we see it on the screen) which is called “Shababa” by the Aztecs, and it’s the location of the underworld in their religion. She thinks that it’s amazing that the Aztecs have picked a dying star to be the symbol of their underworld. Jackman quickly realizes that because Rachel’s out in the cold barefoot, that her condition is worsening. She gives him her novel (handwritten in gorgeous caligraphy, BTW) and tells him to read it, even though it’s incomplete. While he’s reading it, he falls asleep, has his hallucinatory dreams, and is awoken by a phone call from the lab.
They tell him to get down there, because he won’t believe what’s happened to the monkey. He says he can’t and then goes down there anyway. He’d injected the chemical directly into the tumor in the monkey’s brain (they’d cut the skull open to do this) and it was almost impossible to see the results of the incision, it was healing so rapidly. Scans on the monkey show no signs of the tumor abating, but they do show that the monkey’s brain is getting younger (the plant the chemical is derived from came from South America, BTW). He says to change the formula slightly and prep another monkey to experiment on. His team objects, but he says to do it anyway.
He then goes home, reads more of Rachel’s book, falls asleep (ya know, it’s really not a good sign when a character falls asleep reading something that makes up a third of the movie’s plot), wakes to find Rachel gone, reads a note she left, and finds her at a museum, reading Aztec scrolls. (There’s symbolism in these shots which mesh with those in his dreams, both of floating in the bubble and Rachel’s book.) She tells him excitedly how in their mythology, the first father kills himself, and from his body grows the world and the universe. Rachel then collapses and is rushed to the hospital.
Jackman returns to the lab, begins working furiously, get’s chewed out by the administrator for not being with his wife, get’s distressed over the fact that he still can’t find his wedding ring (which looks identical to the one Isabella gives Tomas telling him that if he finds Eden [since that’s where the fountain{AKA Tree of Life} is], she’ll be his Eve), then shows up at the hospital to find the administrator holding hands with his wife. He goes in, the adminstrator leaves, and Rachel tells him she’s not afraid to die and that she wants to be buried on the administrator’s farm. Jackman gives Rachel her notebook so that she can work on it when she wants to. She gives him a present of a calligraphy pen and ink (the pen has symbols on it reflective of the dagger Tomas is carrying that is a clue to the location of the fountain) and says that she doesn’t know how to finish her book, so she wants Jackman to do it for her.
Jackman’s reluctant and heads back to the lab to continue his work. Both monkeys show age reversal, but no progress on their tumors. Jackman gets upset, and then wakes up in Rachel’s hospital room. Her heart monitor starts going wild, Jackman punches the “call” button and starts doing CPR. Medical staff show up with a crash cart, push Jackman away and start trying to revive Rachel. She flatlines, they pull the sheet over her head, and Jackman goes apeshit, trying to revive her and fighting off the staff.
We intercut (and I’m skipping a lot of these because it’s just so damned pointless to mention all of them) to Tomas making it to the fountain, and then to Jackman in the bubble and the tree’s starting to die. Next is the funeral on the farm of Rachel, the administrator says some pretty stupid things, Jackman storms off saying that death is a disease and he’s going to cure it. Jackman goes nuts again, takes the pen Rachel gave him and tattoos a black ring on his finger. We intercut to Jackman in the bubble looking at his finger, seeing the tattoo, then rolling up his sleeves and seeing all kinds of Aztec style ring tattoos. In a voice over he talks about how he now remembers that Rachel was the cause of all those rings. :rolleyes: He and the tree are now almost all the way to Shababba. The tree dies, and he goes nuts.
Then he shows up at the lab, says he’s fine and that they’re to get back to work. At some point, we then cut back to a fight that Jackman had with Rachel at the beginning of the film, where instead of going walking with her in the snow, he goes and shoots up the monkey’s brain. This time, however, he goes after her. We cut to Tomas, crawling up to the tree, and in an obvious act symbolic of sex, stabs the tree with the dagger, it promptly oozes something that looks like milk out of it. He dabs some of it on his wound, and it heals (he was pierced in the side by the Aztec with the flaming sword who guarded the entrance to Eden). He then, jabs the tree harder and drinks the sap flowing from it. Cut to Jackman in the bubble, as it nears Shababba, climbs up the tree, goes into a mediation pose and floats into space. Cut back to Jackman and Rachel in the snow, Rachel hands Jackman a seedpod (and because of a story Rachel told us earlier in the film we know that this is the tree that she wants him to plant on her grave). Back to Tomas at the tree. Suddenly, he starts freaking out and looks down at his side, which is twitching like John Hurt’s in Alien. Disappointingly, instead of an alien bursting out of him and singing, “Hello my baby, hello my ragtime gal” plants begin bursting out of him. He freaks, tries to fight it, but is turned into a plot of flowers anyway. Jackman in the bubble, however, goes through all these really trippy graphics which repeat much of the symbolism we’ve already seen, and a star forms in the heart of Shababba (no sign of a damaged Enterprise circling it, however).
Then back to Jackman at Rachel’s grave, digging through the snow and dirt (You know, I can’t say that I’ve ever watched a movie and hoped for a necrophillia scene before, but it certainly would have livened up the film if one had happened up at this point.) to plant the seed pod. He then stands up, looks up at the Shababba and says something about Rachel, and we zoom in at Shababba as the closing credits start.
Now, the movie looks great, the effects are well done, costumes lovely, the acting’s fine, and the soundtrack (performed by Kronos Quartet) is fantastic. The story, however, sucks. You can make all kinds of interpretations with it, that Rachel’s novel is a recollection of her past life with Jackman, that Jackman discovers the secret of immortality, and then takes the tree that was planted on Rachel’s grave to Shababba. Or that they’d become immortal way back when, and had just forgotten everything but their love for one another, and Rachel died because she’d been away from the tree too long, while Jackman survived because he’d figured out what the tree was. And god knows what else, but really, that’s putting way more effort into the film than it deserves.
If you want to see a Jackman movie where he gives the best performance of his career, then go see The Prestige.
I only made it thru the 1st 2 paragraphs of the OP, then figured I’d check out what other posters were saying…