Déjà vu?

“The Fountain” the latest effort of the director of Requiem for a Dream and Pi was shown us as part of the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival. And well titled, in fact, it was. This movie describes itself best as a fountain.
A fountain of plain obviousness sparkling in the light of unrelenting repetition and set in a courtyard of empty beauty.

This movie, due to it’s visuals and enforced tearjerkyness is well on it’s way to be THE overrated film of the year, and since almost everybody who will see it will disagree with me I feel no compunction with regards to spoiling it, snide little bastard that I am.

The movie, pretending to weave three storylines in one, is about a doctor, name of Tom, played by Hugh Jackman, and his wife, Izzy, played by Rachel Weisz. Izzy is dying of a fast growing brain-tumour, and Tom is hard at work doing research on monkeys that apparently have the same type of brain-tumours as Izzy, and he thinks he is very close to a cure.
At the same time, it is about the book Izzy writes, which is about a conquistador in Spain, Tomas, who is looking for the tree of eternal life for his Queen Isabella, whose country is slowly being taken over by an inquisitor.
Thirdly, we have a futuristic Tom who is flying through space in a bubble, with a big and dying tree, trying to get to a nebula in which the tree can remain alive.

Is it obvious yet?

All three Toms being the same Tom and looking for a way to keep his wife with him for ever and ever and effur?

Well, it should be.

And if it isn’t, the movie lays it on. And lays it on thickly.
Examples?

Well… -At one point we see the “evil” inquisitor with a map of Spain, spreading bloodlike ink over the parts he has already taken over. The map is slowly, and spreadingly, taken over by these bloody patches.
-When Dr. Tom won’t go out walking with his wife in the first snow, as they apparently always do, he immediately afterwards loses his wedding ring.
-We get a number of shots of Tom whispering into Izzy’s neck, and the hairs there standing up to his lips. We also get numerous shots of him whispering to the tree, and the fibers of the tree reaching towards his lips.

And when I say “numerous”, I mean freaking “NUMEROUS”. Seriously, if you take out all the double shots form this movie, it loses about 45 minutes. The fact that it would also gain a great deal of solidity and speed need not concern us here, as it clearly did not concern the makers of this piece.

The makers, who also made “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream”, both movies I really liked, RfaD even making it to the unwritten top of my movielist.
This movie will not. Although I am sure it will for many people.
It is emotional, striking and beautiful, but so, so very obvious.
There are no sweet and silent allusions to pain and the loss of power, in stead the mention that Izzy loses her feelings of warmth and cold is directly followed by a bathroom destroying session of ablutionary sex. See, it tells us, just because she is dying, she is no sad and simpering person, she has sex still!
Obviously, she is a sad and simpering person, just not in the scenes we see of her, and clearly uses this sexual act as a way to regain control of a husband (and through him, life, see symbolism) that is slipping away from her. If the directors had chosen to show us this, in stead of the empty pointing at sparks of dying life, this movie could not have impressed me more. As it is, it just saddened me.

At one point, she collapses in a museum, before the eyes of her horrified husband, and he cradles her until the ambulance arrives. Later, she says at that pont she felt complete, she felt held fast. And the chump answers: “yes, that was me, holding you”. Kinder souls would have liked to take him away and explain to him that she was talking about something else, which was presumably what the movie intended us to think. All I could think was that I’d rather hit him with a good sized clue-stick then and there, as it was so bloody obvious.

I would advise anyone to watch this movie, in all fairness. It is beautiful, and that counts for something.
Also, I will starts selling saltlicks, as a simple grain will not do you for the blatant propaganda against the movie-of-the-weeks in which Cancer is a fact of life, and I am hoping to make a profit as soon as this thing hits the theatres.

Gawd.

Shoes at all stripes but one down, guess which one out of five…

Kevin