The Fountain

Solemn, flashy, and flabbergasting, The Fountain—adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel—should really be called "The Shpritz." The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy, and the metaphysics all wet. The screen is awash in spiraling nebulae and misty points of light, with the soundtrack supplying appropriately moist oohs and aahs.

The Fountain is an exercise in pulp mysticism that, overflowing with ponderous enigma, universal patterns, and eternal recurrences, touches all bases in its first few minutes. An opening invocation of Genesis and a close-up of a golden cross segue to a crib from the sacred text Raiders of the Lost Ark: A fiery Spanish conquistador (Hugh Jackman) is trapped by a horde of growling natives in a jungle cul-de-sac; he escapes by climbing a sacred pyramid to go mano a mano with their flaming high priest. There's a cosmic cut—in the film. Now a bald astronaut who travels in a full lotus position, Jackman wakes up screaming across the snow-globe universe.

Not nearly as pleasurably tacky as a description might make it sound, Aronofsky's historical phantasmagoria jumps between three time zones. There's the 16th-century derring-do in which Rachel Weisz's glamorous Queen Isabella sends Jackman's conquistador to find the Tree of Life and bring back the Sap of Immortality. There's a present-day melodrama in which Weisz appears as the free-spirited Izze, dying of brain cancer while her renegade medical-researcher spouse, Tom (Jackman), races against time to create a cure. Adding to the mystery, Izze is writing a novel called The Fountain, which is actually the conquistador story and which she begs her husband to complete. Finally and least explicably, there's Tom's 26th-century astral projection.

Izze who? Are you what? Together these avatars gaze at the Mayan death star, sit beneath the world tree Yggsdrasil, and make love in a cozy bathtub. Weisz, the auteur's own inamorata, is accorded many close-ups. She's able to carry them, smiling bravely through the tears and claptrap. For his part, Jackman plays Dr. Tom at his most Wolverine-ish—a perfectly grizzled, broodingly ungracious loner given to explosions of sour petulance.

Part fairy tale, part weepie, part frustrated bodice ripper, and part film loop in which beatific Izze invites distracted Tom for a walk (and is grouchily turned down) six times, The Fountain is a movie that prefers celestial whiteouts to prosaic fades and, when it comes to visual emphasis, privileges the overhead zoom above all. By the time the hero's 26th-century self levitates through the deliquescing woods between the worlds and the layers of the cosmic onion to the golden birth canal, Izze's injunction to "finish it" has taken on a new, and not particularly occult, meaning. J. HOBERMAN