What An Intriguing Concoction!

The Fountain (Aronofsky, 2006)

2006-11-30T20:48:00.000-08:00

The Fountain

*This is a bit of a mess, with me referring back and forth between the three storylines, and it's full of muddled sentences. Sorry if it's jumpy or repetitive*

Darren Aronofsky, a director whose previous work I have not seen (but will soon seek out), has crafted a beautiful, moving, and visionary near-masterpiece with The Fountain, his incredibly ambitious and unique examination of love, death, and rebirth. Aronofsky presents his themes across three intertwining (or parallel?) storylines: the quest of a Spanish conquistador in the 16th century, a man's struggle to save his dying wife in what seems to be the present day, and the journey of a man towards a dying star in the distant future.

In the 16th century storyline, Hugh Jackman plays Tomás, a conquistador searching for the secret of eternal life to save Queen Isabella (Rachel Weisz) from the brutal Inquisitors. His quest to find the "Tree of Life" is deeply rooted in Christian overtones, since it is supposedly a remnant of Eden, from which God banished Adam and Eve. This story, that of a book written by the present-day Izzy (also Weisz), clearly mirrors the second storyline in numerous ways, and I see the novel as Izzy's way of coming to terms with her impending death and chronicling her husband's determination to find a cure. The Inquisition, slowly poisoning Spain and encroaching on its people, can be seen as a metaphor for the cancer that is overtaking Izzy's body, and her "brave conquistador" Tomás is obviously inspired by her husband, Tommy, who is using his job as a scientist to explore new frontiers and find "a cure for death". (SPOILER: The way Tomás greedily devours the tree's life-giving sap also foreshadows how the present-day people would misuse the modern day cure Tommy is searching for.) The present-day storyline, a poignant love story that provides the anchor for the film's narrative acrobatics, is absolutely riveting and is able to ground the more fanciful aspects of the other two stories and relay the thematic significance in a more direct way. Izzy's command of her husband to finish her novel implies so much more than finding the right ending for Tomás and Queen Isabella, it is asking him to acknowledge the inevitable truth: that she will die and there is no other way the stories can end. By establishing a strong bond between these two plotlines, the film has a much stronger emotional resonance. The "third" storyline portrays an unnamed man (yes, Hugh Jackman again) and a withering tree (whose significance is left ambiguous at the end of the film, but there are two interpretations that are equally interesting) traveling through space in a bubble to reach a dying star that will eventually explode and cause everything to be reborn. This concept of death as an act of creation is present in the second storyline as well, and lays the groundwork for an explosive (literally) and breathtaking climax that demands to be seen. The incredibly intimate scenes within the bubble are not only visually stunning (like most of the film), but they create a real sense of being enclosed within this space and traveling through the heavens. The man's attendance to this dying tree, assuring it that they are "almost there" and about to be reborn is directly parallel to what Tommy does for Izzy in the second story.

Many people view the storylines as inter-related chronologically, but I'm tempted to say that they are simply the same basic story presented through three completely different frameworks. The characters, their motivations, and the underlying meaning of each storyline seem to be nearly identical and the idea of filtering these through different narrative and visual presentations is a great one. The modern-day Izzy is symbolized by Spain in the 16th century story and the dying tree in the 26th century story, while Hugh Jackman plays a man who is trying to save someone (or something) near and dear to him by curing them of their mortality in each one. The whole experience is simply mind-blowing, and it had me on the verge of tears by the end (somewhere I never thought I'd be when I first saw Hugh Jackman floating in a bubble in space...) I need to see it again before I can say for sure if it's a masterpiece, but as of now I'd easily say it's the best film of the year and one of the best of the decade.

[****]

Marie Antoinette (2006, Coppola)

2006-11-04T18:32:00.000-08:00

Sofia Coppola's visually stunning and stylistically ambitious re-working of the period piece sub-genre daringly sympathizes with one of France's most demonized historical figures, Marie Antoinette, and presents the tumultuous period of her young royalty through her eyes. And these are eyes that widen at a pair of new shoes but turn away when presented with the news of starving peasants. By fusing the 18th-century set design with an 80's new wave soundtrack, all the cobwebs are shaken off the boring old trappings of your regular historical genre piece and the character of Marie Antoinette is brought to life with vivacity and spunk. The soundtrack also makes it easier to view Marie as just another teenage girl who wants to have fun and just happens to be ruling France. Elements of Coppola's previous works, Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides are evident here, in the lead character's displaced, dreamy view of the world around her. As tempers start to flare in France, placing the royal court at the forefront of hatred and slander, Marie escapes in to her garden retreat, finding solace in the presence of nature. Complaints have been lobbied at Coppola for not presenting enough of the peasant's view or the Revolution in general, but that's done quite deliberately: Marie Antoinette didn't give a damn about them. Though she has all the riches and power in the world, she's happiest when she's laying in the grass with her friends waiting for the sun to rise. Coppola once again follows her heroine through a collection of intimate scenes, all played wonderfully by Kirsten Dunst, who has never had an impressive range but shows just how great she can be when perfectly cast. Though the film opens with Marie lounging in a chair luxuriously while Gang of Four rocks out in the background, asking, "What to do/for pleasure?", the mood slowly becomes more somber as the film progresses and it ends with a brief shot of the tattered remains that Marie and Louis leave behind, a shot that perfectly sums up their ultimate downfall by the hands of the commoners they so consistently ignored. And when Marie finally says, "Let them eat cake," it's delivered with such sunny nonchalance that it's actually easy to believe her claim that she never said those words. And after hearing all the scatching, accusatory whispers that haunt the young queen wherever she goes, it's not hard to draw the conclusion that maybe Marie was just like the tabloid targets we have today: infamous, glamorous, and completely misunderstood.

****

2006: The Year In Film

2006-11-04T16:50:00.000-08:00

****
The Fountain
Marie Antoinette
Brick

***1/2
The Illusionist

***
Half Nelson
Casino Royale
The Prestige
Borat
Little Children
The Departed
Stranger Than Fiction
V For Vendetta
Thank You For Smoking
Hollywoodland

**1/2
Babel
Little Miss Sunshine
An Inconvenient Truth
Art School Confidential
The Devil Wears Prada
For Your Consideration
Friends With Money
Mission: Impossible III
Snakes on a Plane

**
Cars
Superman Returns
Flags of Our Fathers

*1/2
Inside Man

*
Miami Vice
Basic Instinct 2
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

1/2
Scary Movie 4

Worthless
Employee of the Month