Aronofsky’s The Fountain

Darren Aronofsky’s first film, π (Pi), one of my all-time favorite films, raises the question “Can we know and understand God, and if we could, what would happen to us?”. His second film, Requiem for a Dream, looks closely and uncomfortably (very uncomfortably) at addiction and its power to destroy our lives. (It also contains one of the most moving and heartbreaking speeches that I’ve seen in a movie, Ellen Burstyn’s “Red dress” speech.)

In his newest effort, The Fountain, starring his fiancé Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman, Aronofsky mixes the Bible (the film opens by quoting Genesis 3:24: “So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.”), New Age philosophy, and an exploration of mankind’s attempts to come to terms with his own mortality.

Aronofsky tells three stories within a story here, with Jackman and Weisz playing the leads each time. The central story takes place in the present, with the other two stories taking place 500 years in the past and 500 years in the future.

In an interview Aronofsky did with Jeffrey Overstreet for Christianity Today, Jeffrey asked “So, The Fountain is a story about learning to accept death as “a spiritual act”?

Aronofsky: I think it has to do with the sanctity of life. The Bible says that the Creator sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden [and they could not] eat from the Tree of Life. The question is, what would have happened if they ate from the Tree of Life? Mortality is part of our humanity; it’s what makes us beautiful. And unfortunately we’ve lost touch with what it means to be mortal.

In many ways it’s about science versus art, and religion versus spirituality. You have these [scientific and religious] dogmas that are the languages of a certain type of discovery, but beneath that you have a certain type of acceptance and truth.

Izzy’s character is leaning more toward acceptance [of death] … and Tom’s character is using the scientific method to fight it. At times, these two methods rub against each other. I think the story is about Tom learning to accept, learning to live in the moment, and learning to accept life and death to the fullest.

One of the coolest things Aronofsky did with this film has to do with the special effects shots for the outer space sequences. According to www.wired.com, instead of spending several million dollars for each f/x sequence, he spent a total of $140,000.

To reinvent space organically, Dawson and Schrecker hunted down old cloud-tank technicians and even hired artists to paint the nebula scenes by hand. But nothing looked good enough.

Then Aronofsky’s team discovered the work of Peter Parks, a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London. Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks’ technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.”

The microzoom optical bench furnished Aronofsky’s film with something neither a computer nor an old-fashioned matte painter could deliver – chaos, in all its ultra high-definition fractal glory. “The CGI guys have ultimate control over everything they do,” Parks says. “They can repeat shots over and over and get everything to end up exactly where they want it. But they’re forever seeking the ability to randomize, so that they’re not limited by their imaginations. I’m incapable of faithfully repeating anything, but I can go on producing chaos until the cows come home.”

Another of the highlights of The Fountain, like Requiem for a Dream, is Clint Mansell’s soundtrack. Once again he features the Kronos String Quartet, but this time around he leans more towards minimalism, a la Philip Glass. You can hear a couple tracks at his myspace page, including the end credits piano solo.

This is the kind of film that I’m sure I will enjoy more with repeated viewings. There are a number of things, such as the role the Tree of Life (or its bark) plays in each of the stories, which I didn’t completely put together until after I left the theatre. As with all of Aronofsky’s films, you are left with plenty to think about after the credits roll. Which in today’s world of cinema doesn’t happen enough.