KEY POINTS:
Films have always had their mortal characters profess their undying love for each other, but few have shown what eternal adoration might look like. That's what The Fountain attempts.
After his low-budget, big-idea films Pi and Requiem for a Dream anointed him as a brain to watch, director Aronofsky came up with this time-bending and mind-bending contemplation about the meaning of: "I will love you forever." Only it seems Aronofsky figured the love part was the least of his problems - the real challenge was the "forever" bit.
It's easy to see why The Fountain has had a troubled gestation (Brad Pitt leaped on the eve of shooting in Australia, taking Cate Blanchett with him when the production shut down) and birth (it has already polarised festival audiences and critics).
But even reduced from its original budget, and occasionally looking the worse for it, The Fountain is actually a film that, lofty ambitions and confusing time-leaping plot and all, is strangely lovely.
High-minded and attempting some spiritual-scientific profundity as it connects the Book of Genesis to the Spanish Inquisition to Mayan creation myths to 21st-century genetics to 24th-century Zen space travel, it might well be.
But it's hard to shake the big romantic heart beating beneath its cosmic leapfrogging or not to be intrigued by its puzzle long after the final credits - some parts of its three story threads may be fantasy. And the whole film may actually just be about a scientist (Jackman) struggling to find a cure for his wife's (Weisz) terminal cancer.
That Blanchett replacement Weisz is Aronofsky's real wife makes this a little more unsettling. (And after A Constant Gardener, is it in her contract that she must have at least one scene lying in the bath?)
The pair also play conquistador Tomas and Spanish Queen Isabella, who sends him off to the Americas on a mission as the Inquisition rips their country apart - the film drawing parallels with the 15th-century explorers and those on the scientific frontiers of the 21st or those making a leap into the stars some time in the future.
It has its weaknesses. Jackman spends rather too long talking to a tree, although the shrub in question has a key role in The Fountain's spiritual scheme of things. And Weisz' incandescent cancer-sufferer Izzy is surely a picture of anything but bad health.
Although despite having to deliver some mildly tortuous dialogue, both give the film an emotional gravity when everything else is flying into the cosmos.
It would be easy to dismiss The Fountain as pretentious, indulgent and confusing as many already have, a film in a failed attempt at life-death profundity to be filed alongside the likes of the Solaris remake or even Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come, while occasionally resembling 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix and even Apocalypto II.
Then again, we live in a year when America's greatest living director is about to get an Oscar for an overripe remake of a superior Hong Kong police film, and many of his fellow nominees are up for recreating historic events.
A curiously economical hour and a half, Aronofsky's high-falutin' flawed film will stick with you long after the credits roll.
It may confuse the shit out of you. But it might also restore your faith in the power of imagination, originality and, well, that crazy little thing called love.
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Rating: M, violence, offensive language
Running time: 96 mins
Screening: Academy
