Aronofsky’s The Fountain

The success of Black Swan seems to have caused critics and others to look back at the career of Darren Aronofsky, and particularly at The Fountain, which was widely trashed when it appeared in 2006.

I haven’t yet seen Black Swan, but I loved The Fountain (Jenn did too) and have been baffled by the reaction to it. It is a big, bold, visually stunning film about love and mortality. It is emotionally wrenching and highly romantic without being at all sentimental. I say this even though I’m not a particular fan of Hugh Jackman (though who doesn’t like Rachel Weisz?) and even though Roger Ebert has just explained to me that I didn’t understand one of the basic points of the film.

Ebert, though he doesn’t think The Fountain is a great movie, does take it seriously. Today he tweeted this: “If ‘Black Swan’ does well at the Oscars, will there be a Director’s Cut of Aronofsky’s ‘The Fountain?’ There should be.” He linked to a 2007 piece in which he explained that there is only one “real” timeline in the movie (the point I failed to grasp) and made this point:

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.