The Fountain

The Fountain (2006) is visually stunning. Its narrative is a post-modern montage that interweaves three plotlines: in one, a Spanish explorer encounters Mayans while searching for the Tree of Life, whose bark will grant immortality; in another, a doctor struggles to come to grips with his lover's death; in a third, the doctor voyages in a bubble to a distant location in the universe, associated with a star which Mayans believe is the home of souls after death.

One may argue that the space voyage is real, that the main character, after eating of the Tree of Life, lives forever, and that he is the same character in 16^th century Spain as he is in the present-time and the distant future. This is certainly possible, as the film offers little assistance in deciphering the puzzles it creates. I believe that the film presents alternative views of a man's struggle to come to terms with death—death in the personal form of the woman he loves, death in the more general form of the fate that awaits every human being. The film in this line of thinking is a tone poem, a sustained mediation (not at all placid or calming) on the nature of death and life and their intertwined nature. Of the three interwoven narratives, the one that is "real" is the present-time narrative about the doctor and his struggles with the notion of death. The Mayan narrative is a story the dying woman writes and which the doctor reads. The space voyage is a metaphoric presentation of the doctor's struggle.

The film begins with the an epigram from Genesis about the Tree of Life, which God hides away from Adam and Eve after they violate his prohibition and eat the apple. In the Genesis narrative, death becomes a basic part of human existence because of this transgression. The Mayans viewed death, according to the dying woman who is writing a novel about them, as a necessary component of life: one has to die in order to live, and so on. This is not a Christian view of death but rather one that finds encouragement in the decomposition of one's corporeal body after death, allowing its elements to be absorbed back into the natural world.

Science views death as genetically and chemically mandated; genes become damaged over time, biological processes become mired in their own effluvium. The doctor who is attempting both to find a cure for death (he regards it as a disease) and for cancer (he wants to prevent his lover's death) intends to alter this mandate. On the same day his lover dies, the doctor realizes that a compound he has manufactured from the bark of a South American tree may accomplish those two goals, but too late to save the woman he loves.

In the third narrative, the main character is voyaging in what can best be termed a space bubble towards a remote location in the galaxy. The bubble's origin is never explained. Perhaps it is a product of highly advanced human technology; perhaps it is a figment of the character's imagination. He is accompanied on this voyage by a tree that looks much like the Tree of Life discovered in the first narrative, although the Tree in the bubble seems to possess the essence of his wife's existence—it responds to his touch, for instance.

These three narratives are presented in sections throughout the film, in non-sequential order. One can sometimes discern logic in how the film transitions from one narrative to another, and it is clear that there is a relationship among them all, though in no literal fashion does the film ever explain what it is. At the end of the film, the doctor does come to terms with death, a point towards which he struggles in different ways in all three narratives. We also witness a nova, the explosion of the star towards which the main character is headed. The film makes clear that through the death of the star the requisite elements of life and the rest of the universe are created. (This is a given of modern cosmology—that the elements of the present-day universe were created in the explosions of stars billions of years in the past). The nova offers confirmation of the Mayan attitudes towards death—one must die in order to live.

I liked this film when I was able to view it in this way—not as a science fiction film, not as a film about a man who discovers how to live forever, not as a New Age film for the brain dead, but as a film that meditates on some of the most basic principles of human existence, on the fact that as human beings we are bound by mortality, that as human beings we are the only creatures on our planet that can actively and self-consciously contemplate the inevitability of their own non-existence.