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Friday, February 16, 2007
Friday Film Review Special: Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain
‘They’ (whomever whoever ‘they’ may be for your particular circumstance) may try to convince you to go see this dire film on the grounds that ‘it is science fiction’. But whilst it does include some genre elements, it could only be described as ‘science fiction’ if we replaced the word ‘science’ with the word rubbish and the word ‘fiction’ with the word film. If you’re on a long haul flight and your two options for in-flight entertainment are The Fountain and a three-hour avant-garde documentary about obese men undergoing naked primal scream therapy, I would strongly advise you to opt for the latter.
The narrative involves three stories that are not so much woven together as pinned to one another with a bolt-gun shaft. In one, handsome Tommy Creo (Hugh Jackman) is experimenting on monkeys in a laboratory that bears a distracting resemblance to the Big Brother house. He’s trying to find a cure for the cancer that is killing his beautiful wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz), and this involves him ‘prepping’ a lot of monkeys, inventing miracle cures in an evening out of South American tree bark and shouting at his co-workers. At one point he discovers an anti-aging immortality treatment, but he’s really not interested in this because his wife still has the cancer. It’s a role that requires from Jackman a lot of brow-furrowing, teeth-gritting and a certain amount of ‘look at me lose my temper!’ behaviour in which he sweeps everything from the top of his desk onto the floor. In fact it’s a performance that reminded me, rather, of the Days of Our Lives doctor that Joey plays in Friends. Weisz, meanwhile, is suffering from an unusual cancer that makes her look pale and interesting whilst in no way taking the sheen from her playful prettiness, or her ability to have sex in the bath, or her tendency to dispense Reader’s Digest wisdom, or her winsomeness, or, actually, anything at all that might distinguish her from any healthy run-of-the-mill movie-star—right up until the moment when she’s in the hospital bed and the beepy-machine stops going ‘beep-beep-beep’ and instead goes ‘beeeeeeeeeeep’. Incidentally, have you ever seen one of those machines in an actual hospital? Heartrate monitors, sure, but a device making a loud ‘beep! beep! beep!’ noise all hours of the day and night? I mean. Really.
Izzi is writing a book, in elegant longhand, called ‘the Fountain’ which constitutes the second strand of the movie. It’s a book so bad that I almost wish (and I don’t say this lightly, since it’s one of the strongest markers of dispraise in my critical lexicon) it had been Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead instead. This story is set in Spain at the time of the conquistadors, and stars Jackman as an honest soldier called Tomas and Weisz as Queen Isabella. To be fair, and despite the fact that this really is the worst part of the film, the C16th narrative at least possessed the saving grace of being hilarious. Inadvertently so, but still. Characters say things like ‘guards, leave us!’ and ‘why are you telling me this?’ and respond to a knock on the door by intoning ‘enter’. The Grand Inquisitor, who could not be more obviously from central casting if he’d had ‘Central Casting’ stamped on his forehead, lashes himself with a whip, scowls, and plots the downfall of Queen Isabella. He indicates the extent to which Spain has fallen under his evil sway by unrolling a parchment map of the peninsular and smearing the area he controls with his own blood. Then he executes a number of heretics by winching them, upside down, to the ceiling and dropping them down again: an action which produces screams of hideous agony and mass death rather than, say, a lot of people going ‘ow!’ and ‘hey!’ and getting to their feet rubbing their heads. Anyway, to defeat the machinations of the evil Inquisitor Jackman’s Tomas must, for reasons that aren’t clearly spelled out, go to Central America with a very sub-sub-Dan-Brown magical dagger (‘it’s not a dagger, it’s a map of the location of the sacred Mayan pyramid on which can be discovered the secret of eternal life!’ … but no! it’s a dagger with three holes in triangular formation on its handle and one more in the middle! It could just as well be a map of Birmingham in relation to London, Cardiff and Manchester. Or of the location of the laughing cow logo on a wedge of laughing cow cheese).
In the third plot-strand Jackman plays a bald guy in a transparent ecosphere floating between the stars. He does a lot of lotus-position meditating, and looks a little like David Carradine in Kung Fu, except in close up, when he looks distractingly like Robert Carlyle’s insane baddy from The World is Not Enough. In this section Rachel Weisz’s role is taken by a tree, either in order to manifest the film’s thematic interest in trees, or else as a frankly honest reflection of the quality of Weisz’s acting throughout. Not a great deal happens in the narrative strand, to be honest, and I was uncertain whether this bald guy is the same bloke as present-day Dr Tommy Creo living out the enormously prolonged lifespan implied by his medical breakthroughs, or whether he simply stands in some nebulous ‘symbolic’ relationship with the earlier character. When not meditating bald-Jackman spends his time eating bark and self-tattooing circles around his arms. Nothing bonkers about that behaviour, clearly. Meanwhile his sphere floats past some very inexpensive-looking special effects, not unlike the coloured-oil-and-water globule projection displays that used to be popular in cinemas before the main programme began.
But what a humourless, portentous, embarrassing mishmash this film is. It strives for an emotional intensity, and wants to say profound things about grief and death, about the need to accept and not fear dying (‘death is the road to awe’ says Weisz’s character, quoting a Mayan priest from her novel). But it misfires on every level. I can think, indeed, of only one single scene that conveyed any feeling at all: Jackman walks along a cacophonous New York sidewalk at night, cars passing, a mass of sparks flying from some welding operation behind him, but the only sounds we as audience hear are his footsteps. It gives a hint that the writer-director of films pi and Requiem for a Dream hasn’t simply gone gaga. But it’s 45 seconds; the film as a whole is 96 minutes. Overall the message of The Fountain seems to be that though sixteenth-century Spain and modern-day New York and the far-future in Space appear to be disconnected moments in time, in fact they are united by the power of risible overacting and a wooden script. No, no, no.
Comments
Adam,
“Whoever they may be”, surely.
Herr Z. You raise an interesting question. I believe my thinking (not that this above piece involved a great deal of thinking) went something like this: for the relevant clause
‘your particular circumstance’ = subject
‘may be’ verb
and therefore ‘whomever’, object.
But perhaps I am in error. I could rephrase:
‘They’ (and your particular circumstances may involve any number of people under the rubric of ‘they’) may try to convince you etc...
From the tone of your review, I’m picturing you sweeping the DVD right off your desk and onto the floor. Kind of like the Days of Our Lives doctor that Joey plays in Friends.
The ‘particular circumstance’ can’t be the subject, because it’s the object of a preposition (’for’ - and while we’re being MegaPedants, shouldn’t that be ‘in?’).
In the sentence you wrote (though perhaps not the one you meant to write), ‘they’ are the subject of ‘be.’
This rule always works: if you can’t substitute ‘me’ for it, you shouldn’t use ‘whom.’
‘Whoever I may be’ = yes
‘Whomever me may be’ = no
/I really need to get a life
"a three-hour avant-garde documentary about obese men undergoing naked primal scream therapy”
Hey! I labeled those tapes “private” for reason!!
"Then he executes a number of heretics by winching them, upside down, to the ceiling and dropping them down again:”
Torquemada used to do just that. I have a feeling it’s a lot more painful/destructive than it sounds.
Knemon, Herr Z.: I kiss the rod.
Incidentally, have you ever seen one of those machines in an actual hospital? Heartrate monitors, sure, but a device making a loud ‘beep! beep! beep!’ noise all hours of the day and night? I mean. Really.
Incidentally, have you ever seen a ‘dramatic device’ before? Not merely a thing but an exaggerated representation of a thing, meant to heighten tension? I mean. Really.
(That’s a rhetorical question of course; I know you have, and am actually fond of your other writing. But this, this...)
Your review may well be spot-on about the film’s quality (I’ve not seen it), but you’ve picked some truly irrelevant things to bitch and moan about, here. Rachel Weisz that hack insists on looking beautiful while she dies? The effects aren’t bog-standard CGI? Why, you almost lead me to believe, sir, that the film is stylized in some way - which is a surprise, given the almost cinema verite quality of Aronofsky’s first two films…
Doesn’t sound like science fiction at all, actually - given the suspicious lack of ‘science’ in any description of it I’ve read, or indeed the publicity materials themselves. Sorry you were led astray - and sorry to hear another voice raised in condemnation of the film. I’d planned on seeing it eventually; your review has actually gone a long way to dissuading me. But the review itself...well…
Waxbanks. Well ... indeed. Your comment demonstrates, almost as well as does my original piece, that sarcasm is surprisingly hard to do well.
Oh no, don’t get me wrong - your criticisms of The Fountain are funny, and you’re probably right about the film in general. (I thought pi was a laughable mess, ably made, and Requiem hit or miss; I wouldn’t be surprised if The Fountain was indulgent and empty.) But your review seems...thin. Is that fair? I’m not interested in whether good writers like a certain piece of art, I’m interested in why. ‘Whether’ is a crap shoot half the time; ‘why’ was (to my eye) mishandled this time out, and in a familiar way - one that frustrates me. I do apologise for needlessly snarking though.
Oh, and: Yer mom!
I’m not sure who to root for.
Wax: no need to apologise. I might ask: does thin art merit a thick response? But I take your points. Indeed, with a flourish, and to ease Scott’s mind, I yield the field completely.
A PS (to adapt Herr Z), Wax:
Oh, and: Yer mom!
“Yer Mum”, surely?
Scott: Darren Aronofsky, obviously. :)
Adam R.: It was my birthday this week so I will not let you forcibly Anglicize me! Next week maybe. If field-yielding is the thing, I’m in (by heading out). More substance from me next time, promise.
<<I will not let you forcibly Anglicize me!>>
Isn’t the issue the forced Americisation of my Mum? She’s Welsh, you know.
Belated happy birthday, by the way.
Very well - mum’s the word.
/kills self
can’t we just bash Happy Feet instead?
They = subject
May be = verb
Whatever = “Gleichsetzungsnominativ”; which would be subject case again
“To be” is not a transitive verb and certainly doesn’t take an object.
But be glad you don’t have to think in such categories when you think English.
Aren’t you the author of a book called Dr Whom? Now we know why, surely.
It is I.
It’s me.
It may be whomever.
Whomever they may be.