The Fountain

Movie Review: The Fountain starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.

No rating possible. This is a movie about the serial or parallel lives of the characters of Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Hugh is alternately a conquistador, a doctor, and a semi-mystic guru-like floating man. Rachel is alternately the Queen of Spain, an author, and a ghost. Watch as they try to unravel the secret of life. Literally. They discover the Tree of Life, supposedly a companion to the Biblical Tree of Knowledge from Eden and work to exploit it for personal gain. In the end, following the recurring theme of life sprouting from death, Hugh's character seeks to fly the Tree of Life into a dying star in the nebula in Orion's leg, thereby fulfilling the prophesy of the Mayan Indians that believe that the nebula is the afterlife where all souls go to be reborn. It appears that Guru Hugh was successful, but that is not at all clear. His relentless motivation for this effort was to save the woman he loved, but his quest had become maniacal in the end.

My wife turned to me after the movie ended and said, "Can you explain to me what just happened?" The correct answer to this question is, "No."

Either someone dropped several tabs of acid, ate a bag of psychedelic mushrooms, and mainlined some PCP before writing this movie, or someone is the most brilliant person ever to write a movie. Maybe both.

Not many stories leave me completely wondering what the hell was meant by the movie. I tend to like deep and obscure plotlines. But this one succeeded in keeping its meaning hidden from me.

What do you do when you don't understand something? Enjoy the pretty colors. Rachel is always cute to look at, so the movie had that going for it, and Hugh Jackman is either an amazingly versatile actor or had one heck of a makeup job or both. This movie manages to keep you completely confused and frustrated intellectually without making you want to stop watching and without making you frustrated emotionally. It's unclear to me how it manages this trick. My simple statement would be that I enjoyed the movie.

I'm just not sure why.