The Fountain

Heedlessly tripping the light fantastic, this turgid and insight-free hippy dream from the mind of Darren Aronofsky lurches on a thin line between hyper-ornate space oddity and extended perfume advert. A three-pronged narrative sees Tommy (Hugh Jackman) and Izzi (Rachel Weisz) flit casually between the sixteenth and twenty-sixth centuries as they impotently descend into mental turmoil at the idea of impending mortality. Tommy spends half the film either crying or smashing up his office, while Izzi deals with her terminal illness by coughing up dreary factoids on Mayan death rituals, her pout constantly bathed in soft-focus close-up. What dialogue there is seems to have been snagged from fortune cookies (‘Death is the road to awe’), with Clint Mansell’s slushy, one-note score accentuating the hubris further. Though many will succumb to its hallucinatory visuals and glib philosophising, it’s basically Woody Allen’s ‘Love and Death’with the jokes taken out, and that’s not very funny at all.