The Fountain is a difficult movie and I can see why writer/director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) had trouble getting it produced. Budget cuts and changes in the cast caused him to trim down his original story. The result is still a good movie, but it is not without its flaws.

Its story is told in three sections, in three different time periods, all of which center around death and the search for immortality. Hugh Jackman plays Spanish Conquistador Tomas in the past and scientist Tom Creo in the present and the distant future. In the past, he is sent by Queen Isabel (Weisz) of Spain to find the tree of life. In the present, he is seeking desperately for a cure to his wife's (Weisz again) brain tumor and he thinks he may have found it in the bark of a tree from South America. The bark, when tested on monkeys, seems to grant eternal youth. And finally, in the future, Tom is traveling through space in a bubble, with the tree of life, toward a distant dying star, which may or may not be Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld. Is this future sequence real or is it entirely symbolic? It's up to you to decide.

Whatever Aronofsky's point is in making this film, he keeps it dangerously ambiguous. Anyone who felt let down by the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey will surely feel equally let down by the ending of this movie. The meaning I took from it is that death is a part of life and in seeking to prolong our life we very often forget to live it. Either that or its a love story between a man and his tree.

Tom, for instance, knows that his wife is dying and that his time with her is limited, but he prefers to spend time at his lab in a seemingly impossible quest, rather than spending time with his wife. He refuses to listen to her when she talks about her impending death, as if by ignoring it, he can make it less real.

Even when I wasn't quite clear what Aronofsky was trying to say with this movie, I was never bored with it. Most of the time I complain that movies these days are too long, but here's one that could have been, and maybe should have been, a little longer.

While it's easy to overlook amongst the visual weirdness and convoluted storylines, Jackman turns in an emotionally charged performance. He anchors each of the different portions of the story and provides the connection between them all. Weisz is fine as well, but hers is a much smaller role.

This is clearly going to be a movie that causes a love/hate reaction. Those kinds of movies aren't always the best kind, but they are always the most interesting.

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