From Day 8 of 06 Toronto International Film Festival we wrote:
The Fountain
3 p.m.
Ryerson
What if you could live forever?
In this parable about the search for eternal life, Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz transcends time and space.
So he drove out the man; and he placed Cherubs at the east of the garden of Eden, and the flame of a sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. - Genesis 3:24
At the heart of Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is a love story between a conquistaor and his Queen, a doctor and his wife; it's the biblical passage of Genesis 3:24 set against the Spanish excursion into 16th century Americas in search of the fabulous tree of life from whose elixir is the fountain of eternal youth. Zigzagging back and forth from the 16th century then set in modern times and going far beyond into a fabulous future - The Fountain is the quest of Hugh Jackman's character to save his wife Rachel Weisz alive physically and preserve her spirit throughout time. He is under the crush of painful memories and what ifs? of that day when he forsook his one last time with her request to "walk with me" in the wintry snow in order to go to the lab to pursue his scientific experiment. While frantically trying to find a cure for his wife's tumour by operating on cancerous lab monkeys, he finds a procedural drug that stops the aging process - derived from a leaf from a particular tree in South America. In fact the drug has restored the youth of the test monkey. It's a miracle that his colleagues want him to keep pursuing, but the cancer is still there. His superiours want him to pursue the drug, but he wants to find the cure for cancer to save his wife. The love story of The Fountain is wild and fabulously excessive, voyaging through the span of centuries of time and space. Without the editing quirks of Aranofsky's previous Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain is suffused in golden tones and transcendent spirit. Faith, hope, rebirth. Death is the road to awe.
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