The Fountain

"What if you could live forever?" the poster asks us. Well, I for one might be more inclined to see more films like this. But life is rather short...

OK, metaphysical cinema is rather hard to pull off. Even the more successful examples such as Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colours:Red have a lingering whiff of pretension about them. (Pseudo-deep can be a bit borderline too. Take for instance The Matrix trilogy and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was actually at his most successfully metaphysical when he wasn't really trying that hard: Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining).

In fact good metaphysical narratives of any kind are a rare treat outside of Childrens' fiction. Jorge Luis Borges is surely the all-time master, with the likes of Paul Auster among the more competent modern exponents.

In this game of unlikely parallels and strange coincidences the trick is to give the impression that you might actually be onto something. I believe the correct term for what these stories require is a vanishing point: a super-dense point of profundity towards which all meanings within the narrative are orientated, which itself remains just beyond the field of comprehension.

Aronofsky's unusual tale of time-staggered quests for the source of the undying life came highly recommended to me by a colleague. Yet I'd also seen Philip French's review in the Guardian in which he quipped "This movie truly puts the 'awe' into awful" and it was towards this latter critique that I found myself leaning.

The Mayan cosmovision and Spanish history get very short shrift from Aronofsky, a director who openly admits a penchant for lifting ideas out of their native soil before splicing them and re-planting them in a mixed-bed of creative shoots that he imagines will look rather good together.

Yet what this mystical mélange ultimately fails to deliver is anything like a fresh twist on any of our age-old intimations about life, death and our place in the cosmos. Its vanishing point dematerialises prematurely without yanking any significant meaning or emotional insight out of the situation(s) confronting the couple played by Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman.

According to the IMDB, some of the exteriors were shot in Guatemala, but judging by the results, they hardly seem to have been worth the trip.

At one point Jackman's conquistador is seen praying in front of a replica of the ceiling of the bath-house in the Alhambra, one of the decorative features of the Moorish palace that most impressed V when we visited a couple of years ago.