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    The Fountain, and A General Complaint

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    Something terrible must be infecting the popular critics of today to make them call The Fountain “out there.” What movies have these people been watching?

    I went to see The Fountain with expectations of something bizarre and phony. Instead, it is a metaphysical love story/rumination on mortality that stretches the imagination in the way that a film like Hero did. It’s a bit of dream-like fantasy mixed so well with familiar reality that our general understanding of human existence seems up for question. This was not a conventional Hollywood movie, but neither was it an Ashes of Time or Last Year in Marienbad, two movies which made a lot of really intelligent people think, “This is brilliant, but someone tell me what the hell is going on!”

    On the contrary, The Fountain was very accessible, and Hugh Jackman delivered a very difficult performance (never have I seen a male character cry so much, and in so many scenes). Maybe the problem is that the film did not give any definitive answers. It’s a looping, potentially infinite, time-traveling type of movie - and that is one of its strengths. But for critics - presumably educated people - to be “confused” by this makes me wonder about the state of film criticism and education today. It doesn’t matter to me if a person doesn’t like the movie, but how on earth can you not understand what is happening on the screen (Leslie Felperin of Variety says it is “incoherent”)? There were similar complaints about Syriana - some people had a hard time “figuring out” who was who and what was happening when they were watching the movie. I went to see it, thinking I needed to be wide awake and paying strict attention lest I be completely lost. Not so much. I only went to high school for one year and I had no problem following the story. Did I know the whole plot within the first fiften minutes? No, but that’s not a requisite for good films.

    Well, some critics did seem to appreciate The Fountain. One reviewer, Gabriel Shanks, of ModFab wrote, “I’m happy to report that Aronofsky’s labor of love is as gorgeous and emotionally cathartic as you’ve heard; it is also as overwrought, trite and overbaked. Whether you can accept the naivete of the premise is up to you; this is a film of images and thought, not plot. What is astonishing, however, is its singleminded certainty of its own virtue — you have to look back to Malick or Kubrick to find an American filmmaker offering up such a challenging vision to a mainstream audience without apology.”

    I feel about The Fountain the way I did about Gangs of New York. A lot of people hated GoNY because of its over-the-top-ness. I agree that it was messy and a little out of control, but it was also so sincere and passionate that sitting in the theater watching it on a giant screen filled me with some hope for the creative process. We cannot always achieve perfection, but something must be said for breaking free of the box-office-calculating/tested-to-death-by-
    audiences style of film-making. The Fountain struck me as more restrained than GoNY, but it’s a powerful story that demonstrates a genuine talent.

    And its theme was meaningful to me. A movie it reminded me of (also mentioned in Shanks’ review) was Soderbergh’s Solaris. There is something really exquisite about Solaris, though it also received mixed/bad reviews (often described as “dull” - have any of them watched an Antonioni film?). Maybe it’s that it has the intimate feel of a movie that was made by a director who was able to make the film he wanted.

    In a nutshell, I’m disappointed by a lot of critics. Maybe their brains are made numb by being forced to review movies like Dumb & Dumber. I take in a goofy comedy or romance once in a while, but I’m not going to waste my time repeatedly writing about them and trying to measure their artistic quality. This is like a food critic having to write about every hot dog and bag of chips they eat. No mortal mind would be able to endure this without injury.

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    2 Responses to “The Fountain, and A General Complaint”

    1. Anonymous on December 4th, 2006 9:30 am

      Just wanted to say that it’s a great commentary on the commentary about The Fountain. I completely agree that the film doesn’t require some vast imagination to be accessible, and it seems more that audiences imaginations and tolerance are diminishing.

    2. Reel Fanatic on December 4th, 2006 1:30 pm

      I’m ashamed to say that I’ve missed this one so far, so will probably have to wait for DVD … As for the critics, most of them don’t get Aronofsky, which he doesn’t seem to mind one bit

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