Darren Aronofsky’s (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) award-winning and daringly-epic 2006 film, “The Fountain”, is a deeply spiritual piece centering on three men’s intertwined quests for immortality. All three story lines run concurrently, despite the men being separated by hundreds of years in their respective journeys.
Hugh Jackman deftly plays three main characters: the conquistador Tomas, the neurosurgeon Tommy, and the ‘spaceman’ Tom Creo. Audiences are first introduced to Jackman as the conquistador Tomas, who quests for Spain’s fabled Fountain of Youth—thought to be in New Spain, hidden for millennia by the Mayan civilization. Viewers then meet present-day Tommy, a scientist racing to cure his wife’s seemingly incurable brain cancer by any means possible, even going so far as to experiment with the bark of an ancient South-American tree on a tumor in a monkey. Finally, audiences are introduced to Tom Creo, a ‘spaceman’ drifting through the cosmos in the undefined future, accompanied by an ancient tree that sustains him on his quest for “Xibalba”, the collapsed-star realm of the Mayan afterlife.
Aronofsky seamlessly melds together Mayan, Hindu and Christian traditions of death and the afterlife, centering on the Mayan tradition of the “First Father”, a man who sacrificed himself for the creation of life and the world at large, who then was immortalized by a tree of life sprouting from him. Similarly, Aronofsky references the Christian tradition of the “Tree of Life”; the tree Adam and Even chose to forego for the “Tree of Knowledge” and eat of its forbidden fruit, which led to their banishment from the Garden of Eden. Throughout the movie, the tree remains an important and central symbol to all three men, perhaps most vividly illustrated by cosmos-wanderer Tom, who is floating through space with an ancient tree that possesses a life of its own, and presumably the soul of his deceased wife, Izzi Creo.
As the film progresses, the connection of the quests becomes more apparent. Each man is struggling to “cure the disease of death” as modern-day Tom so eloquently states. The quest is not about living forever so much as it is about staving off the inevitability of death. Each man comes to his own final revelation. Tomas, the conquistador is ultimately (and quite literally) consumed by his quest, giving life to lilies at the foot of the tree he quested for. Tommy, the neurosurgeon, finds a breakthrough treatment for brain cancer in his wife’s final hours, only to find that she has already passed, his last opportunity to talk to her in life escaped while he raced to find a cure in the lab. Tom the spaceman and his traveling companion tree, along with the ghost of his wife, finally reach Xibalba, and are assimilated into its core, where presumably they are re-birthed in the Mayan tradition.
The plot summary sounds dizzying, and make no mistake—it is. However, Aronofsky does and admirable job of stitching the stories together, while Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz (Izzi Creo) and Ellyn Burstyn (Dr. Lillian Guzetti) do an outstanding job of connecting the audience to the storyline in a believable, human fashion that lends the film a necessary dose of credibility.
The Fountain is a project of so broad a scope, it is hard to imagine it could be conceived with any amount of credibility or clarity. However, Aronofsky and his ensemble pull it off with great aplomb, leaving a breathless audience to ponder an age old question in a new light: is death the end of existence, or is death just the beginning?