The Fountain

2006 dramatic drivel

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A triad of stories! There's a bald guy having sex with a tree in a floating snow globe. There's the same guy (with hair though) researching a cure for cancer by cutting open as many monkeys as he can find while his author wife dies of cancer. And there's the story in that wife's book about some Spaniards who go searching for the Tree of Life. Ah, man, I think he just ate his girlfriend! Oh, snap! This monkey's gone to heaven!

Overly ambitious and ultimately really really pretentious stuff from the guy who brought us the interesting Pi and the abysmal Requiem for a Dream. I will say that I liked Hugh Jackman a lot in this. Not so much any of the other performances, and I even thought Rachel Weisz was borderline terrible. I didn't like the look of the movie at all. One word: slick. Everything looked artificial and computery, and at one point I thought for sure that I was watching a Smashing Pumpkins video instead of a movie. The dialogue, while an attempt for the cryptic and poetic, is strangely insipid. This is the kind of movie that makes its point with an ironing board, and I had to get a towel to wipe off all the pretension from the screen after it was over. It's really too bad. It seemed like a lot of love and hard work went into this.