Interview. Darren Aronofsky.

Drawing on the roundtable discussion with Darren Aronofsky that Michael Guillén recorded in mid-November, Sara Schieron maps a few possible entryways into the radically independent director's most challenging film yet, The Fountain.

"As early festival rumblings suggested and the final product confirms, you're either with The Fountain or you're against it," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "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."

"'Pretentious' isn't inherently a bad word," insists Aaron Hillis at the Reeler. "Thus, to dismiss writer-director Darren Aronofsky's hyper-ambitious third feature The Fountain - a heady fusion of science fiction, metaphysics and a melodramatic quest for immortality both romantic and spiritual - for simply believing in its own sentimental grandiloquence is to deny one of the most exquisite and strangely moving trips to the multiplex this year."

Updated through 11/28.

"By the time the hero's 26th-century self levitates through the deliquescing woods between the worlds and the layers of the cosmic onion to the golden birth canal, Izzi's injunction to 'finish it' has taken on a new, and not particularly occult, meaning," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. Even so, "What The Fountain lacks in coherence it makes up in ambition."

"Like a story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Fountain dispenses with everyday assumptions about time, space and causality and tries to replace the prose of narrative cinema with a poetic language of rhyming images and visual metaphors," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "I wish I could say that it succeeded. At his best - which is to say as a maker of gorgeous, haunting compositions (exquisitely rendered in Matthew Libatique's cinematography) - Mr Aronofsky can achieve an eloquence that suggests a blend of Andrei Tarkovsky (speaking of rhymes) and comic books. But his commitment to conveying meaning and emotion through painstakingly constructed images also gives the movie a static, claustrophobic atmosphere."

"It's a story of overreaching that itself overreaches, but that might have been impossible to avoid. Any film that concludes with an explosive demonstration of the universe's incomprehensible vastness wouldn't feel right if it felt perfect," writes Keith Phipps, giving it a "B+" at the AV Club, where Tasha Robinson talks with Aronofsky.

Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly: "I'll concede this is a deeply silly, rather awful movie. But The Fountain is also so passionately sincere and heartfelt about its own silly awfulness that it eventually grows somewhat pitiable. It's tough to kick a mewing kitten, even one this stupid and ugly."

The tale of the film's making, from conception to opening, is unusually long and twisty, which is what justified features by Steve Silberman in Wired, and now, Michael Idov in New York.

"I might not have liked it, but I certainly respected it," writes Matt Singer at IFC News, where - online listening here - Alison Willmore and Matt Singer disagree at IFC News.

"With its disjointed narrative and experimental touches, The Fountain is not going to rock the masses or even thrill the majority of the art-house crowd like his Requiem for a Dream did," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "But, puzzling though it may be, it's a truly original film."

Capone talks with Aronofsky, a big AICN fan; and Jeffrey Overstreet interviews Aronofsky for Christianity Today.

Earlier: "Venice. The Fountain."

Updates. Anthony Kaufman talks science with Aronofsky for Seed.

"These days, nothing is as easy to deride as dead-serious romance." Time's Richard Corliss comes out: he's pro-Fountain.

Jeffrey Overstreet in Christianity Today: "Aronofsky shouldn't be punished for his seriousness. The film's solemnity is appropriate for its subject matter, and it reflects the artist's sincerity. It's not often that moviegoers have such a tangible sense of the storyteller's own struggle to work through personal experiences, questions, and fears.... And in a time when few films have the courage to say anything more than 'seize the day,' isn't it refreshing to find someone willing to take cosmic questions seriously?"

Updates, 11/23: David Lowery: "For all its empyrean visuals, I found The Fountain curiously earthbound. I don't actually think that this is the fault of the film; I think it was an inherent side effect of the idea becoming a film. In other words, it's as good as it could be in this form, but it's never as good as it could be before it became physical - a common disparity, perhaps, but one exacerbated by six years of treacherous and fairly public development."

"Part dewey-eyed paperback romance, part acid-trip planetarium show, this extravagantly silly movie comes on like the second coming of 2001, and there are enough fancy shots of Hugh Jackman seated in a yoga position while floating through the solar system inside an embryonic bubble that you can imagine the superlatives soon to appear in the movie's ad campaign: 'Brilliant!' 'Visionary!' 'A mind-blowing sci-fi head trip!'," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "In truth, The Fountain is closer to one of those vomitous fantasy romances, like Somewhere in Time or this past summer's The Lake House, where the two lovers are so destined to be together that neither time nor space nor plain old common sense can keep them apart. The only viewers who risk having their minds blown are those who didn't have much of one to start with."

"Yes, The Fountain overreaches on every level, and that's exactly what I like about it," insists Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com. "Big subject, big canvas, big ambitions. A young director's ungainly and overwrought folly? By all means, in the sense that Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia or Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho or New York, New York or Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 are follies."

"It looks like the trippiest yoga video you ever saw, or something out of What the Bleep Do We Know?," suggests Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "But for all the fancy effects and the elaborate costuming, all I was left with — what with the tree, the sap, the soil and the regenerative powers of death and decay ('What if death were an act of creation?' flaky Izzi asks her brain surgeon husband) — is that it all comes down to fertilizer."

"You'd be within your rights to guffaw at all this, as most of my colleagues already have," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia Weekly. "But disbelief is not a mark of sophistication any more than belief is a mark of simplicity, and The Fountain is a movie worth believing in."

"[A]t once overblown and underwhelming," declares Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly.

Mike Russell: "It's an ambitious, passionate, grief-stricken work of film art. It's probably going to tank at the box-office, but I think cult audiences will be discussing it for years."

"[S]urely the foolhardiest commercial venture in the genre since Steven Soderbergh's Solaris," adds Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader.

"Could this yet be one of those films that split critics and fans?" asks Ben Child. "Could one man's obtuse and over-intellectualised mess be another man's cult tour-de-force? US audiences, at least, are about to find out."

On another note, Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "The Kronos Quartet returns with their astounding strings, marking one of the few instances where original music outdoes the film; until The Fountain's last half hour, I was viewing the film as a series of interrelated music videos rather than genuine cinema."

Update, 11/24: Chuck Tryon: "[T]he attention to atmosphere simply served as a reminder that there really wasn't much going on in the film to begin with."

Update, 11/25: Peter Sobczynski interviews Aronofsky for Hollywood Bitchslap.

Updates, 11/28: "I don't doubt it was a deeply personal project for Aronofsky; he spent six years struggling to get it made. But what's onscreen too often struck me as theoretical and not lived-in." Matt Zoller Seitz's review - analysis, really - seems to be pretty much the definitive take. A must-read, including the thoughtful comments that follow at the House Next Door.

Gabriel Shanks: "When all of most trusted moviewatching friends are losing their minds over one single film, you better buy a ticket, pronto.... And yes, it's as good as they say... maybe not the best film of 2006, but as Nick says, 'it goes a long way toward redeeming the year.'"

Just launched in conjunction with the release of Ellen Burstyn's Lessons in Becoming Myself: an official site.

Posted by dwhudson at November 22, 2006 8:01 AM