The Fountain...of boredom

Film: The Fountain

Audience: me (46) and son (12)

One more off my to-watch list. Note to past self: don't bother.

I love weird. I love beautiful. I love sci-fi. I love fascinating stories and compelling characters. Darren Aronofski's The Fountain had too little of each. It's two-and-a-half interwoven stories. In one, Spanish conquistadors search for the biblical Tree of Life a la Garden of Eden. In another, a biologist is on the cusp of a breakthrough that could change humanity and save the life of his dying girlfriend. In the -and-a-half, the biologist is taking his girlfriend-tree up to a dying star in a magic space bubble. I was encouraged to watch it primarily for the visuals, and to a lesser extent the sci-fi and the drama.

The visual aspect:

As stunning as the visuals are at first, they don't stay fresh for long. You've seen the poster of a guy and a tree in a bubble floating into a nebula. That made for quite an image for a few minutes, but they just keep cutting back to it without giving us a clue what's going on. And that whole segment is so awash in some of the worst cliche, new-age pamphlet images that started getting on my nerves almost immediately. Lots of images of a bald guy in kung-fu pajamas meditating in the lotus position among the stars and bathed in a cosmic/spiritual light...gag. This third of the movie looks like every hokey new-age pamphlet you've ever dropped in a garbage can ten steps after some stinky hippy shoved it in your hand.

The sci-fi aspect:

What if you could live forever? Who knows? They pretty much asked the question, then moved on without looking back. A biologist finds a tree who's sap heals all ailments and could give eternal life, and possibly save his girlfriend who's dying of a brain tumor, which brings us to the final point...

The drama aspect:

...the biologist's lab boss comes in and tells him the cure works, seconds after his girlfriend dies in his arms. 

There's porn, where it's just people "doin' it" on screen for the sole purpose of giving you sexual arousal  without any aesthetic value. Recently the very useful term was coined, "torture porn" which provides some with sadistic arousal. After watching Fountain, I'm moved to further extend the construction to "tragedy porn" in which you're given to watch people being sad in the same fashion. Sad, sad, sad...the end. She's sick, and he's all emotional, but she's strong and "not afraid" (she keeps hitting us over the head with this fact). Then she's dead, and we get to watch everyone be sad for what seems an eternity--what if you could be sad forever? In lieu of  a story, they real-quick run through the textbook Kübler-Ross stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression & acceptance). Watching this with my son, we had one of those great comic moments of spontaneous synchronicity where I started the sentence and he finished it with me, "It would be really sad...if only we cared." That's it. There's no reason to care about them. We spend the first thirty minutes trying to sort out what the heck is going on as the film is intentionally weird and confusing, and the characters are more ciphers than souls which makes it hard to emotionally relate to or invest in them.

But I was a good viewer. I never fast-forwarded or skipped ahead. I had faith that there'd be some kind of payoff if I endured till the end. The payoff? A guy turns in to a bush. That's it. It was kinda cool, I guess. hardly worth two hours, though. Like the whole movie, pseudo-profound.

It imitates depth, and for a teenager, it might actually pass as deep. But it's really just that guy who's a pretentious freshman philosophy major trying to impress all the bimbos at the party with how deep he is.

Dark, dull, dour, slow and sophomoric. When it was finished I suggested my son put in a DVD of something less boring. He quipped, "that could be just about anything."

My advice, don't hesitate to fast-forward. You won't miss anything you can't see on x30 speed.