Darren Aronofsky’s micro-epic The Fountain has a rare ambition for an American film. This ambition is not in its scope, but is because the film is unabashedly sentimental, romantic, un-ironic, and sincere in its belief in the strength of connection between life, art, and metaphysics in human love, and it expresses itself through an old-fashioned montage style of filmmaking. Tom (Hugh Jackman who, when not bald, gives a remarkably strong and heartfelt performance), a research surgeon, zealously struggles so that his work can achieve a breakthrough that can cross over to help cure his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz), who is terminally ill. Izzi has come to accept her eventual death and her separation from Tom by writing a story called “The Fountain” about a 15th century conquistador’s search for the Tree of Life in the New World, and in which she very broadly crosses Spanish Christianity with Mayan spirituality to explore ideas not of life after death but of life through death, of accepting death. While Tom’s inability to cope with the fatal illness of his wife in the present is the central story of The Fountain, Aronofky rhymes the movement of its narrative with that of the Spanish fiction, with Jackman obviously as the scruffy and loyal conquistador and Weisz as the glowing Queen, as well as rhyming this diptych with a futurist or atemporal segment that features a bald Jackman meditating and reflecting on his grief under a dying tree flying through space. In each segment Jackman becomes more and more frustrated, unable to find the salvation of the Tree in the Spanish fiction, the scientific cure in the present day, and to get over memories of losing Izzi in the future.

Aronofsky audaciously avoids tidy, tight, or properly developed drama in his evocation of the ways we rationalize, fictionalize, mythologize, and find faith and acceptance in the inevitability of death by emphasizing visual and narratives rhymes between different forms of expression. These modes are of the internal (Tom’s turmoil and grief taking the form of the tree in space), of fiction, myth, religion, and history (Izzi’s book), and of the rationalist, scientific, and human present. While the director, who also wrote the screenplay, indulges in much heavy-handedness as well as a sometimes refreshing and sometimes superficial, if not downright silly, literalness in his concept (the film is far from the ambiguity of Kubrick’s 2001), he most successfully lays bare the way humans struggle to find structure and meaning in the navigation of their lives, and in their grasping onto love to conquer human failings. By repeating camera shots and movements, graphic patterns and narrative revelations between segments, Aronofsky makes obvious the kind of connotative formal organization of mise-en-scène that many films do subtly as a way of enforcing, expanding or commenting on the dramatic narrative. Instead of using this technique as integrative and supportive, Aronofsky makes the very structuring itself the focus, the tripartite failure of Tom to conquer death, and from that coming to accept its inevitability. The effort may often be awkward, if not overly simple, and while the script makes no pretense at trying for any kind of conventional or realist drama, the central, present day storyline treads a frustrating line between the pat writing of Tom’s alienation of his wife through his struggle to cure her, and the simplified abstraction in the very character of Izzi.

But editor Jay Rabinowitz lends a voluptuous viscosity to the progress of the film, which, complemented by Clint Marsell’s unifying, rhythmic score, imbues Aronofsky’s low budget, claustrophobic vision with a myopic dreaminess, all tight close-ups of Jackman’s pained sorrow and Weisz’s soft-focus gorgeousity. As with Aronofsky’s grand use of montage, the director’s allegiance to the actors’ faces in such a somber and structural work gives the film a human element, however abstract, that, while failing as a drama that the film never attempts to unify, successfully escapes the film as a beautiful, poetic evocation. With its tableaux-like presentational syntax, The Fountain is a movie that has a rare emphasis on what is conjured up out of the sum of its parts rather than reveling in the details of the cine-drama. Like in those unusual films of classic Hollywood director Frank Borzage, whose erotic close-ups of his leads expressed a transcendent kind of romanticism that feels very singular amongst the many hackneyed romances of the period, The Fountain brazenly aligns itself with the beauty and the solemnity of love, and the special way it can be expressed in the cinema.