62. Who Wants To Live Forever &...

Lyrics

There's no time for us
There's no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams yet slips away 
from us

Who wants to live forever
Who wants to live forever....?

There's no chance for us
It's all decided for us
This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us

Who wants to live forever
Who wants to live forever?

Who dares to loove forever?
When love must die

But touch my tears with your lips
Touch my world with your fingertips
And we can have forever
And we can love forever
Forever is our today
Who wants to live forever
Who wants to live forever?
Forever is our today

Who waits forever anyway?


This is not one of my favorite Queen songs, but it is another example of their genius. They manage to seamlessly combine opera with rock in a way that I've really seen no one else do. In the song the sentiment is expressed that you wouldn't want to live forever. So I chose a movie that deals with the quest for eternal life. 


The Movie: The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006)

I think The Fountain is Darren Aronofsky's best movie, which doesn't say much coming from me. I haven't seen Requiem For A Dream (or Pi) yet, but I didn't really like Black Swan. And I completely and utterly disliked The Wrestler and its banality. As for the Fountain, this movie certainly isn't banal. It may be in fact a bit too ambitious for it's own good. As IMDB claims "The Fountain is a story of love, death, spirituality and the fragility of existence in this world, spanning over one thousand years and three parallel stories." All that and it lasts only 97 minutes. Now that may be to studio interference, but I am not sure if the movie would have been better if it took longer. Even at 97 minutes Aronofsky seems to completely run out of ideas and imagination. But for the most part this is an interesting film with some inspired filmmaking.

There is actually one main story here and it is set in the present. Hugh Jackman plays Tom Creo, a doctor who performs tests on monkeys, trying to find a cure for brain tumors. For him these experiments are even more urgent than usual, as his wife Izzy (Rachel Weisz) has a brain tumor. In their early scenes we don't know this yet, so we are left guessing why Tom is so concerned for Izzy and why her behavior seems a bit odd. It is quite unnecessary to keep Izzy's tumor a mystery (although he does it through some clever filmmaking), as the movie becomes a lot better once we know what's going on. Suddenly the scenes between Tom and Izzy become more moving and gain urgency, so does Tom's obsession with finding the cure. And when a monkey's tumor seems to miraculously shrink in such a way that Tom seems to believe he's actually found the cure for death, he is rather frustrated (but also fully understands) he has to follow medical and scientific procedures before he can apply it to his wife. Aronofsky makes Tom's frustration quite palpable, and he raises several interesting questions what Tom's discoveries mean and their ethics. It is just unfortunate that he never really explores these questions much further. What is fortunate is that he added some humor to this story. After The Wrestler and Black Swan I thought Aronofsky was incapable of that.

The two other stories are meant to show us the inner lives of the characters. Influenced by her disease Izzy has written a book called The Fountain. It is set in Spain during the inquisiton. The Spanish queen (played again by Rachel Weisz) asks the conquistador Tomas (played again by, you guessed it, Hugh Jackman) to find the Tree of Life which is supposed to be somewhere in South America. And if the existence of this Tree of Life can be proved supposedly the inquisiton will be over. Why this will be so is never really explained, and Aronofsky films a bit too many dull battle scenes in the dark. But these scenes do flesh Izzy's character a bit more out. In the main story she presents herself as a brave woman, who is unafraid of death, but through her story we realize that's just a (brave) facade. This story also shows us how much she loves Tom and how enormously grateful she is for his unrelenting experimentation. It is an interesting way show us a character's inner life, but Aronofsky completely wastes Rachel Weisz in this movie. She never gets to act out all these thoughts and feelings. Apart from a nice scene as the queen of Spain she hardly has anything to do. In the main story she only has to be a sickly woman and in the third story (which I'll discuss later) she is merely Tom's memory. It's a bit of a shame. Weisz is one of the best actresses working now, while I think Hugh Jackman is one of the dullest actors. He is not bad here, but he is nothing special.

As you may have guessed by now, Izzy dies in the main story. She couldn't finish writing her book in time, so she ordered Tom to write the final chapter. Tom's writing is the third story in the film. And again Aronofsky does some things right and some things wrong. Tom turns Izzy's historical fantasy into a science-fiction fantasy. He now lives in something like a bubble in space with Izzy who has taken the form of a tree, the tree of life in fact. It is tough to describe this image really, because Aronofsky has truly created an image we haven't seen before. Only again, he doesn't much know what to do with it. He shows it to us in many different angles and we see the now future Tom being haunted by the tree and memories of his wife in living form. Aronofsky connects this story in an interesting way to the main story. In this story Tom starts an imaginary dialogue with his wife and mid-dialogue Aronofsky then cuts to the main story where the same dialogue continues. Still this is the worst part of the film since here Aronofsky seems most unable to engage with the ideas he introduces. It doesn't come as a surprise then that the film eventually ends with a special effects extravaganza that's completely meaningless. Aronofsky incoherently meshes ideas of different religions on eternal life without ever going anywhere with them. It is a bit of a shame that these are the obvious religions like Buddhism and Christianlity. The concept of eternal lfe has been explored countless times in our (popular) culture through these religions. What was also intersting about Izzy's story was the fact that the tried to explore this concept through Mayan myths.

I sound a bit too dismissive of this film, but as I said before I quite liked it actually. Aronofsky does show here that he is a really good and rather unique filmmaker who knows how to play around with the medium. And he plays here with grand ideas few filmmakers are even interested in touching upon. Unfortunately he doesn't really know how to explore them and what to do with them. This maybe could have been a great movie if he only focused on the 'main' story and looked at how our ideas on eternity (which used to be processed through religions) are being changed by scientficic progress. Or if he took these ideas even less seriously and followed through on his pulpy sensibilities he exhibited in the last part of the move. In any case, I am now a bit more interested in seeing Aronofsky's previous, and future films, though there is still no big release I anticipate less than Aronofsky's upcoming Noah.