The Fountain has made me like Aronofsky’s previous film, Requiem for a Dream, even less. Many slate Requiem for a Dream as one of the best films ever made about addiction. Quite the contrary. Its visual self-obsession and over-reliance on technique tends to mimic the selfishness and duplicity that characterizes addictive behaviors. This is an admittedly harsh reading of the slick exterior of Requiem, and the burden of proof would lie on my shoulders to demonstrate such a criticism, but The Fountain confirmed my suspicion that Aronofsky has a hard time making films about actual people.


At the center of The Fountain is a sci-fi love story bulging with potential for some intriguingly humane filmmaking, but Aronofksy leaves this central story underdeveloped in such a way that in never actually balances out the lavish visual attention it receives. I kept waiting for The Fountain to turn towards its two main characters, but it constantly draws our attention towards the visual context of their time-bending narrative instead. For some reason, Aronofsky's directing can't seem to penetrate the wordless mystery of loving human relationships like Gondry, Jonze, or other very visually oriented directors. (I pick these two specifically because they have put together engrossing love stories with a concentration on technique equal to The Fountain.) The closest contrast I can get to Aronofsky's consistent failure in this respect is the extended scene in The Secret Life of Dentists when the whole family is ill. While watching that scene I remember being so struck with how Aronofsky-like it was in its execution, but completely unlike Aronofsky it managed to be tender, emotive, and intimately connected with the central character of the film. The Fountain is yet another evidence that he is a great stylist, but he hasn't really made a film about people yet. Oddly enough, his most abstract film, Pi, is probably his most personal film to date.


When thinking about The Fountain in terms of its closest neighbor, 2001, I become even more disenfranchised with the film. Whereas 2001 is a brilliant execution of myth, ultimately ecumenical and open-ended, Aronofsky's film is isolated, privatized, and internal. The film turns in on itself at the end, almost sunk under the weight of its central character's grief. Anything that could be said positively about The Fountain's use of imagination, abstraction, and mythmaking in the face of life and death is undercut by its central self-absorption, as its characters end up as isolated as Aronofsky’s technique. I recall coming across a word-picture in one of Jonathan Edward's books in which he describes sin (as with any good Reformed theologian read: the human condition) not as the heart ranging too far in the world, but as the heart closing in on itself and becoming inexpressibly tiny. I couldn't shake this analogy while watching The Fountain.