by MARK SLUTSKY

Conquistadors, supernovae, the Spanish Inquisition, Mayan temples, space yoga, sex with trees... at just over 90 minutes, Darren Aronofsky’s (Requiem for a Dream) The Fountain sure packs a lot in. Or at least it seems to at first: a love story spanning thousands of years, from the Middle Ages to the distant future, it would seem to qualify as epic, if anything does.

But for a movie that attempts to span so much, it all ends up feeling rather small. It’s basically the same story repeated three times in different settings, in a willful lead-up to a grand psychedelic epiphany about death, rebirth and letting go. And that story, is, well... have you seen Love Story? It’s the same kind of thing: a beautiful, young, free-spirited, dying woman (Rachel Weisz) and the hunky hubby (Hugh Jackman) who can’t save her.

The Fountain is set in three time periods. In one, Jackman is a conquistador charged by the Queen of Spain (Weisz) to travel to South America and find the ancient Tree of Life; in the present day, he’s a determined doctor desperately trying to cure his wife’s brain cancer; and in the third, he’s a bald guy who eats bark and controls a spherical glass spaceship with Tai Chi, directing it towards a dying star named Shabulba. The running theme in all three, of course, being the search for eternal life.

Now, no argument, the movie’s mind-bending visuals are often quite lovely. Props to Aronofsky for foregoing CGI in favour of an experimental F/X technique where everything was brewed up in a petri dish (although it was presumably all composited on a computer).

And really, on the surface, this sounds like the kind of film I’d love to love—I am 100 per cent behind the idea of millennia-spanning mystical psychedelic space operas. But man, is this movie self-serious. Like Requiem, it’s humourless, airless and its high-drama histrionics just leave you kind of cold, although Ellen Burstyn, as Jackman’s doctor mentor, manages to inject some warmth into the movie.

Not enough warmth, really, to make an emotional connection, because in the end The Fountain isn’t much more than a soap-opera-style tearjerker dressed up in Buddhism and high-toned sci-fi—even if it is the only weeper this holiday season featuring an exploding star named Shabulba.

The Fountain is now in theatres

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