The Fountain...or faucet or shower or puddle or whatever it was called.

I watched The Fountain for the first time last night and I have a few thoughts. For those of your who haven't seen it, The Fountain is an independent film that parallels the efforts of a conquistador to save his queen's life as she faces persecution by finding the Tree of Life with a surgeon who seeks to save his ill wife from dying by finding a cure for cancer. Both stories focus on the results of the conquistador's and the husband's futile attempts to save the queen/wife. The story of the conquistador was written by the dying wife, all save the last chapter, which she leaves to the husband to write. Now, in the book, The Fountain, all things parallel exactly with their realistic narrative counterparts, save the ending. The husband, in his failed attempt to save his wife, manages to find the secret to immortality and lives forever. He writes the ending of the book so that the conquistador, after finding the Tree of Life, is killed by the absorption of its life giving sap into the wound that was about to kill him. The conquistador was killed by his discovery, where as the surgeon became immortal thanks to his. In the ending, as the conquistador went to place the ring on his finger, signifying his union with the queen as a result of his find, the sap began to kill him. Enigmatically, the instant the surgeon finds out that the experimental drug he has been working on can save his wife, she dies. While writing her book, the wife mentions to her husband her fascination with the idea of death as a means of creation, stemming from the belief that the Tree of Life came from the sacrifice of the First Father according to Mayan legend. The husband, in turn, when writing the ending to her book, kills the conquistador with the Tree of Life, thereby using creation as a means of death. The conquistador's body becomes a bloom of the Tree of Life, which is vastly significant as well as the wife says that she once spoke to a Mayan who said that seeds for a tree were buried above his fathers grave and that his father became part of that tree; the tree was "his road to awe." Hearing this, the husband ends the novella by turning the conquistador into a bloom of the Tree of Life after placing seedlings above the grave of his wife. The key to immortality for the surgeon turns out to be a tree in South America, giving truth to the the piece of fiction his wife wrote about the Tree of Life that the conquistador searched for.

The Fountain is a tale of passionate futility that places an emphasis not on life or death, as the story would suggest, but rather on choices. The idea is presented that nothing matters but the ending, as seen through the relentlessness of the male leads to save their loved one from their unavoidable death. However, the lesson is that in life, the emphasis should be placed on the journey, where both the queen and the wife place it, rather than on the endings that the conquistador and the surgeon become hellbent on changing. In both stories the women are stereotypical archetypes of the "Angel of the House" so to speak, made evident by the visual emphasis placed on the light/dark contrast between the two women and their prospective men. At the time of her death, the wife says that she feels whole and isn't afraid. This is the theme of the entire film; the point of life is to be complete and whole with who you are and what you have in the time you are given, rather than never taking the time to admire the precious present do to a futile quest to make more time. Time by itself means nothing. It only becomes valuable when the people living in it give its moments value.