Critics reviews

When a $75 million production goes into turnaround and is made for $35 million, elements get eliminated. When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a Director’s Cut of this movie, and that’s the cut I want to see.

The Fountain certainly doesn’t lack for ambition, a fact that frequently gets it into trouble but which also, ultimately, stands as its most endearing quality. The film’s trippy melodrama is, at its core, an intensely grandiose and sincere rumination on the nature of love as the universe’s only eternal element, as well as a poignant portrait of the inherent cyclicality of existence.

One cannot help but want to praise The Fountain for its sheer ambition. It's always a delight to know that there are people willing to attempt projects like this, and I do hope that the fact it's sure to be a flop won't rob Aronofsky of the funding necessary to try again. Anyone who appreciates the craft of filmmaking will find this fascinating. Anyone with eyes will find it beautiful. Ironically, it is a film rich in the fruits of knowledge, but lacks any real sense of life

The US indie director Darren Aronofsky has made a couple of excellent films - Pi and Requiem for a Dream - but with this third one, he has, as they say in Hollywood, laid an egg.

Despite some attractive cinematography The Fountain is too underdeveloped and pretentious for audiences who enjoy narrative and character driven films and too contrived and conservative for people who prefer experimental film and the avant garde. There are some interesting ideas beneath the surface of The Fountain but the film is just too superficial and too silly to explore them with any integrity.

Among those few hardy souls who did go to see it, it has won fans — becoming more popular rather than less as it disappears from US screens. These few, these happy few, enjoy every confusing, dizzying, obscure minute of it — and they’re right, too. Because this simple fable about love and death makes a virtue of its flaws and emerges as one of the most moving and thought-provoking films of the year.

The metaphysical complacence of the movie’s ending is not only the culmination of the director’s hubris, it’s an allegory for that hubris. The Fountain is the story of a gifted artist who dared to reach for the stars and paid for his ambition with a really stupid movie.

Aronofsky’s reach far exceeds his grasp with this film, and the muddle he concocts makes one wonder if there was ever a solid foundation for The Fountain. Hope may spring eternal, but this fountain is a dry hole.

It's a visual knockout, drenched in fantastic imagery that inevitably recalls an Aronofsky idol, Stanley Kubrick. But there's a coldness to Aronofsky's vision here that works against the emotion he wants. Even the rapturous shots of Weisz--in which we can sense some real-life passion between director and the actress to which he's engaged and with whom he has a child--lack some of the charge they should have.

To his credit, Mr. Aronofsky does not explain too much, and “The Fountain” leaves a tantalizing sense of puzzlement in its wake. Parsing its logic and arguing about its premises will be among the main activities of the small, devoted cult of admirers that is likely to gather around this movie, protecting it from the derision of the uninitiated. The problem, though, is that its techniques run too far beyond its ideas, which are blurry and banal, rather than mysterious and resonant.

Not since John Boorman's Excalibur has a film worn its Jungian imagery so unashamedly. If the scenes of the 21st-century Jackman and Weisz didn't play out so movingly, The Fountain might exist solely in the realm of symbols and ideas. Their flesh, blood, and tears (and more tears) keep it grounded, however, giving Aronofsky the license to take his long-delayed, doggedly pursued film over the top in other respects.

There’s something as recklessly okay about The Fountain in its imperfection as there is something undeniably cockamamy; it’s an entirely mood-dependent experience enhanced by identification with romantic/spiritual/kabbalistic/journal-or-blog-keeping tendencies of one’s own, and ruined by impatience.