The Citizen

To prepare for Darren Aronofsky's next film, the festival hit "The Wrestler," I decided to stop delaying my viewing of the director's divisive, millennium-spanning 2006 work: "The Fountain."

I'm thankful I did. Though "The Fountain" doesn't always satisfy its lofty ambitions as a grand treatise on life and death, its touching love story and sobering glimpses of man's fear of mortality still speak through the film's din of abstraction. Hugh Jackman is remarkable as Tommy, a present-day doctor tailspinning as he struggles to save his wife, Izzi, from terminal cancer. In Rachel Weisz's skillful hands, Izzi is vibrant, but the flashes of fright in her eyes betray a saddening vulnerability.

Concurrent with this narrative is a Spanish Inquisition-era quest through South America by a conquistador, also played by Jackman, who seeks the fountain of youth for Queen Isabella, also played by Weisz. And in the future, an astronaut (Jackman again) floats toward a golden-hued nebula in a large transparent orb with a dying tree and visions of the long-dead Izzi his only companions.

Some viewers may find "The Fountain" too weird or too abstract. On the surface, the three narratives are tied together only by the recurring faces of Jackman and Weisz. It's never clear which - if any - time frame is the film's true setting, and which are flashbacks, dreams or symbolic interpretations on the director's part.

But thematically, each story compellingly explores man's formidable fear of death and the fallout of his efforts to delay or even avoid it. Aronofsky depicts this instinct with the most intensity when the conquistador savagely plunges a knife into the Tree of Life to free its rejuvenating sap, when Tommy throttles a nurse after Izzi passes away, and when the astronaut neurotically frets as the tree wilts from his stripping its bark for his own sustenance. Through these moments, as well as the haunting performances of Jackman and Weisz and Aronofsky's inspired visual palette, "The Fountain" peers with fresh perspective into darker corners of the human psyche.