The Fountain (2006)

YOU PULL ME THROUGH TIME.

by Chad Perman

When a film as bold, strange, confusing and beautiful as Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain comes along, you can either pick it apart endlessly or simply give yourself over to it.  A philosophical art-house love story dolled up as a time-bending science fiction epic, The Fountain is a frustrating and rewarding film, a reminder of art’s ability to connect and transport us, to confuse and perplex us.  All of which is probably just a fancy way of saying that this is an incredibly strange film.

The Fountain tells three stories as one larger story, a man’s quest for love and immortality that spans 1,500 years and takes us all the way from the ancient jungles of ‘new Spain’ to a futuristic world on a dying nebula star somewhere in the far reaches of our universe. The thing that connects these things, these stories, is the relationship between a man (Hugh Jackman) and a woman (Rachel Weisz), a love that seems to tie them together eternally, though it’s never entirely clear if all three versions of the characters are intended to be the same two people (and this ambiguity - the fact that I could easily make a valid argument either way on this issue - is quite likely part of Aronofsky’s point).

Let’s start in the present though - the axis around which the rest of the plotlines seem to orbit - where we meet Dr. Tommy Creo (Jackman) and his wife Izzi (Weisz). Izzi has a terminal brain tumor and Tommy, a research scientist, is trying desperately to find some kind of cure to save her life before it’s too late, staying long hours in the lab working on experimental cures with monkeys. However, in the process of his obsessive quest for a cure, he’s neglecting what little time he has left to spend with his dying wife.

For her part, Izzi - who seems to have accepted her fate (which continually crushes Tommy) - is working on a novel entitled “The Fountain” in which a conquistador named Tomas (Jackman again) is sent to the New World by Queen Isabel (Weisz again) to find the mythical Tree of Life. Scenes from his struggles and battles to find the Tree are interwoven throughout the film, though it’s often hard to pinpiont just which storyline is informing which - a move I found innovative and refreshing but will no doubt frustrate a large number of people hoping for a more linear and easily understood experience.

But I haven’t even gotten to the really weird stuff yet.

The third and final plotline (if that’s what we’re calling these various narrative strands) takes place in the 26th century, as a bald man (Jackman, yet again) drifts through space in a bubble, accompanied by only the bark of an apparently dying tree, on his way to some distant nebula believed to be the location of…something.  It is this piece of The Fountain’s puzzle that will be most confounding to most - and to be sure, it’s filled to the brim with an aura of pretension and ridiculousness that makes it a very easy target for derision - but in the moments it works, it becomes a rather glorious (if borderline silly) spectacle, light years away from anything you’ve seen on film since Kubrick’s 2001.

If all this sounds a bit much, well, it is - and in a way that’s what I love about The Fountain. You could fairly lodge several complaints against the film and its excesses, but you certainly couldn’t call the thing “standard” or “formulaic” in any way; it’s exactly the kind of thing Hollywood tends to run away from (and, at one time in The Fountain’s long and troubled production history, it did just that - the original film was set to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett before star and budget issues brought it crashing down).

I watched The Fountain in a sparsely populated theater in the middle of the day a handful of years ago and somehow, years later, I find myself still as intrigued by it as I originally was on that cold and cloudy December day when, emerging back into the light of day, I felt at once calm and confused.  I still haven’t figured a whole lot of it out, and probably never will.  But that’s not the point of a film like this; the point is the mood, the visuals, the epic sense of emotion in the film. It’s not perfect - and it’s definitely a bit of an overindulgent mess at times - but it meant something to me, on some level.  And in the end, that’s all I’m ever really asking for in a movie.

Chad Perman is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Filmosophy. He searches for meaning and time travel opportunities in Seattle.

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (2009)

PRECIOUS

by Chris Cantoni

Chances are you’ve heard some buzz regarding Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire over the past few months.  Executive produced by the likes of Oprah and Tyler Perry, it’s a fictional account of a young girl in Harlem having the misfortune of being born into a shitshow all her own.

And a shitshow it is.  Precious, the eponymous main character, is a sixteen year old girl on her second pregnancy, the product of her own father, emotionally and physically abused by her mother.  Let’s just get that out of the way right here: this isn’t a family comedy.  In fact, once you’ve seen the trailer, it’s likely you’ve already decided whether you’ll see it.  You either want to be bombarded by something like that, or you don’t.

It’s easy to argue that you don’t want your feelings manipulated, or don’t want to ruin your day, but this isn’t Dancer in the Dark, or Requiem for a Dream.  Precious is ostensibly about hope.  Precious detaches herself from her life to dream up visions of stardom: walking down the red carpet signing autographs, being fawned over by adoring crowds.  She does the same thing we all do at sixteen and beyond: dreaming of something better.

The performances are brave. Mariah Carey sans make-up (who, wonderfully, ends up being more real than she has ever been to me, the hint of a mustache across her upper lip), plays a concerned welfare officer.  Paula Patton portrays Precious’ teacher, Ms. Blu Rains, with the patience one wishes could be in every classroom.  And Mo’Nique, as Precious’ mother, is heartbreaking in her transitions between cold indifference and dark fury.  But Gabourey Sidibe, as Precious herself, is the star here, projecting slight rays of hope through a veneer of the tired inevitability of her life.

Sent to a new “alternative” school (“What this is?” she asks the admissions woman), Precious is placed in a small class with her devoted teacher, Ms. Rains, where for the first time she is told that she can do something, told to push.  She went through all other English classes earning an A- without saying a word and without learning much either, but in her new class she is finally able to emerge enough to actually be there, existing in the moment without any flights of fancy.

And so it goes.  The strength of Precious is that even though it may not be real, it is based in reality.  The filmmakers won’t pull any punches or back away from their subject, but you also won’t ever be manipulated into feeling something that wasn’t there.  Every scene could end in disaster, not because they want to sucker punch you, but because it is the reality of Precious’ life.  In the same way she wants to escape into her imagination, we inevitably want to escape into a happy ending, but the film won’t let us.

I’m reminded of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, where O’Brien discusses the truth behind Vietnam stories.  It’s never about the story and whether it’s fact or fiction, but whether it conveys the truth of that world.  Precious is like that.  I don’t know if there are obese girls in Harlem raped by their fathers and abused by their mothers, but I don’t have to; the film has helped me know the general by showing me the specific.

Without resorting to manipulation, the film portrays a tragic life, but instead of being hardened by the severity of Precious, I’m softened by its sincerity.  As Precious’ illusions are tossed away, so are our own and we are left with this stark picture.  By refusing to see Precious, perhaps you’ll protect yourself from a troubling and foreign reality - but with the same hand, you’ll be denying that there can be hope in such a reality.  And that, more than anything out of the film, is something worth knowing.

Chris Cantoni is an aspiring screenwriter living in Los Angeles.  He tumbls here.

Wes Anderson Week: A Glimpse into the Future

A SPECULATIVE WES ANDERSON FILMOGRAPHY, 2013-2075

by Andy Sturdevant

“I read this article that said all the Italian workers at Cinecitta are saying, like, ‘He’s the Maestro, he’s Fellini, come back to life!’” – My friend Dave on Wes Anderson’s work on The Life Aquatic, 2005

“I’d blown it, Friedkin had blown it, Altman went into eclipse, one flop after another, Francis went crazy, even Raging Bull didn’t do any business. Everybody kind of blew it in varying shapes and sizes.” – Peter Bogdanovich, 1997.

“His often damaged characters are viewed in a compassionate light.” – Wikipedia.

The Dreyfus Affair (2013). Following two generally well-received adaptations, The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and The Rosenthaler Suite (2011), Anderson writes and directs a bizarre remake of the 1937 Paul Muni biopic The Life of Emile Zola, with Jason Schwartzmann as Zola in the lead role. Though the film wins praise for its meticulous art direction, carefully composed 19^th Century Paris setting and anachronistic Yves Montand soundtrack, critics savage the film. “He seems more interested in getting the waxed mustaches of French military officials correct than in understanding the life of Emile Zola,” complains one.  Some over-analytical critics feel the film is a misguided attempt to refute the type of unsentimental naturalism Zola championed; others find this over-analytical criticism ridiculous and suspect Anderson just wanted to make a credible film with lots of beautiful 19^th Century Paris interiors. A beautiful slow-motion scene of Emile Zola purchasing a live lobster at the Saxe-Breteuil Market for dinner and silently walking back to his apartment to the strains of Montand’s “Les Feuilles Mortes” is particularly celebrated and/or lambasted.

The Last and Best of the Peter Pans (2017). The death of J.D. Salinger in 2015 at age 94 seems to have shaken Anderson and plunged him into a period of reflection. He isolates himself in an apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan for several months. The screenplay he emerges with is an account of a wealthy young heir (played by unknown John W. Stillman, Jr. in a breakout performance) who becomes the first male to graduate from a prestigious eastern women’s college and subsequently strikes up an odd friendship with a self-sacrificing Pakistani ice cream man in Central Park. Some hail it as a return to form. Detractors agree, noting it is a return to the very specific form of youthful, damaged elites in a romanticized New York City interacting with near-mute foreign-born stock characters. Reviews are mixed.

The Sisters Tagliatelli (2019). Anderson seemed here to be self-consciously addressing his reputation for consistently writing thinly developed female characters. “Three chic, mysterious women (Kat Denning, Kristen Stewart and Emma Watson) silently and mirthlessly sit around an apartment in Venice smoking for two hours and listening to Leonard Cohen,” complains one critic. “Barely a movie,” grouses another. The film is light on dialogue, heavy on “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

Mission: Impossible X:II [a.k.a. M:I:X:II] (2022). Inexplicable commercial forces compel Anderson to step in for an ailing Paul Thomas Anderson to direct Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible XII. Tom Cruise weighs 275 pounds and is former governor of Ohio. Adrien Brody and Luke Wilson play estranged twin brothers that bring Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character out of retirement when they threaten to destroy a fictional U.S. state resembling Connecticut with invisible Tesla frequencies. The soundtrack is entirely pre-T. Rex Marc Bolan solo recordings. A box office disaster, and the beloved franchise lies dormant until it is reinvigorated four years later with Sophia Coppola’s reboot The Impossible Mission.

The Black Maria (2025). Anderson’s audacious attempt to make a feature-length commercial film using turn-of-the-20^th-Century silent kinetoscopic technology gets him exiled to France for ten years. The film features a grainy, stand-out performance from Anjelica Huston in her last role. The film is celebrated in certain neo-Luddite circles as America enters its sixth SuperRecession in ten years, but distribution is limited. Anderson’s insistence on a live piano score anytime the film is publically screened further cripples the film’s commercial prospects.

Rushmoreville (2035). Anderson’s 35-years-later sequel to Rushmore, written with Owen Wilson and 100-year old fellow Texan Larry McMurtry, proves one of his most controversial films. Adrien Brody steps in for the tragically deceased Jason Schwartzmann as Max Fischer, now in his forties and president of Bloom Amalgamated Offshore Manufacturing, Inc. He is confronted with the return to town of Margaret Yang, who harbors a painful secret. All assume Max and Margaret will resume their high school romance. Can these friends find equilibrium in middle age? Mixed reviews.

Seen Those English Dramas! (2037). A well-received 3D concert film of Vampire Weekend’s legendary thirtieth anniversary performance at Madison Square Garden. “Two timeless institutions make rock music history together,” enthuses one respected Internet commenter. “A bunch of twee old farts reliving the Noughties,” gripes a college-aged Internet commenter.

Well-Respected Men (2040). The death of Ray Davies in 2040 at age 96 seems to have shaken Anderson and plunged him into a period of reflection. He isolates himself in an apartment in Lambeth, London for several months. The screenplay he emerges with is an account of two eccentric, emotionally shattered musician brothers whose 1960s beat group travels from the UK to India in search of enlightenment with a large supporting cast of oddball characters. Internet commenters complain Anderson has been repeating himself for forty years, but Well-Respected Men sweeps the Oscars, including prizes for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and a long-denied award for Best Director. A generation of young American filmmakers, having grown up through the hardships of continuous SuperRecessions, idolize Anderson and admire the now-vanished, never-was world of affluence and whimsy his characters inhabit. The turbulent 2040s are marked by a resurgence of interest in his work in the American film industry. However, Bollywood now unquestionably dominates the world film establishment, and celebrated young Indian filmmakers, for some reason, are not impressed with Anderson’s body of work. His popularity remains a strictly provincial Western phenomenon. The hero of all young Bollywood filmmakers during the 2040s? Andrew Bujalski.

Anderson directs a few more lesser films until War Between the States II: This Time, It’s Personal tears the Republic into small warring factions in 2049, thus obliterating the film industry. Anderson retires to a villa in the People’s Republic of Greater Maine, where he dies peacefully in April, 2075.

Andy Sturdevant is a writer and artist living in Minneapolis. He tumbls here.

Wes Anderson Week: The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

A SOLIPSISTIC TRAIN RIDE

by Elizabeth Wilcox

All right, let’s get the business out of the way first. The Darjeeling Limited is probably no one’s favorite Wes Anderson movie. And that’s being diplomatic. When I told my boyfriend I was writing about Darjeeling for Filmosophy, his response was (literally), “What?? Why would you want to write about THAT movie?”

So, yes, I know: Darjeeling is flawed. It’s no Rushmore. I agree. But I think it’s worth talking about anyway.

Darjeeling is about three brothers—Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman)—who have distanced themselves from each other in the year since their father’s death (and their mother’s estrangement). At the behest of the suicidal Francis, they embark on a highly regimented “spiritual journey” to India with the intentions of saving the family. If you flinch at this description (it’s so cliché! it’s so reductive of India and spirituality! it’s so grossly indie!), you are probably right to. But I think the flaws in this film are actually intentional on Anderson’s part.

As A.O. Scott noted in the New York Times, “even when we learn bits and pieces of [the characters’] history … the sorrow is never traced to its source.” This is true. Even in the (fantastic) short film that precedes the movie, Hotel Chevalier, wounds both internal (Jack’s need to distance himself from his girlfriend, played by Natalie Portman) and external (Portman’s conspicuous bruises) go without explanation. Though Anderson’s tendency to flood his films with details seems to place him on the opposite end of the spectrum from the notoriously curt Ernest Hemingway, I think Darjeeling’s move away from emotional motivations is actually very Hemingway-esque.

This is a movie about solipsism, about materialism. This is a movie about possession and dispossession, about megalomania—about believing it is possible to control and erase the events and emotions of your life. Those who point out what they see as cultural insensitivity in this movie are spot-on; the brothers’ egos lead them to see India as nothing more than a convenient cultural context with which to draw an exotic veil over their inconvenient rich-boy neuroses.

But this problem lies in the characters, not in Anderson himself. In fact, Anderson not-so-subtly criticizes the way these characters behave. As the brothers sit in the dining car, they touch on the subject of their mother (“Heard anything from mom?” “No. Have you?” “Me neither”). Immediately following this exchange is a shot of each brother taking out a different anesthetizing medication. Peter’s is an “Indian muscle relaxer” that he got “at the pharmacy next to the train station.” For Jack: Indian flu medicine with a tranquilizer in it. And Francis pulls out the “strongest Indian pain killer you can get.” The brothers are literally using surface-level pieces of the Indian culture in order to numb themselves, to distract themselves from the real problems, to escape from the things that are actually important to deal with.

This same conundrum is at work in the unforgettable but highly troubling sequence in which an Indian child dies in a river-crossing accident; Peter tries to save the boy, but fails. Many critics latched onto this scene as racially exploitative (using another culture as merely a backdrop to enhance the white characters’ selfish revelations). But I don’t think Wes Anderson is that oblivious. Yes, the scene and sequence feel “off”—it marks a startling change in atmosphere and feels like an overly-forced epiphanic moment—but again, I would like to believe that the tone was intentional. That Anderson is offering a sly mockery of these privileged white men. That we are not meant to take Jack and Francis and Peter’s stoic, grave funeral expressions as important reflections of important emotions that we should all share, but instead as the misguided attempts of three men to feel a connection to something that they are not actually a part of.

Yes, the brothers appropriate a tragedy that lies completely outside themselves in order to feel somehow cleansed of their own emotional baggage. Even the way they talk about the death conveys this—Peter says simply, without cracking an expression, “I didn’t save mine.” “Mine”—the brothers see these Indian children as merely another thing in their long line of possessions, theirs to claim or lose track of.

But can we blame them? It is so easy to take refuge in material things. Nearly everyone who sees the movie notes the obvious metaphor: the bulky luggage the brothers cart around with them throughout the movie is a stand-in for their overwhelming emotional baggage. However, perhaps this is not merely a surface-level simile, but instead an indication of what the brothers, in their solipsistic fashion, believe they can do – they believe they have the power to turn their emotions into objects, that they can take the edge off of life by translating feelings into things.

This is not the first time Anderson has presented unsavory characters in his films, but it is perhaps the most troubling, as we don’t form a strong emotional attachment to Francis, Peter, or Jack. In a way, that makes Darjeeling Anderson’s most harsh, realistic film—and also the least likeable. When we watch The Royal Tenenbaums, we can see Royal’s glaring flaws as a husband and a father—but we are also so drawn to his character that we are able to excuse his failings, to laugh at them.

Anderson doesn’t give us such relief in Darjeeling. We have the flaws, but not the reason to love them. And maybe that’s good. Maybe we need a kick in the pants, maybe we need to be reminded that there is a real danger in alienation and repressed feelings and the substitution of witty remarks for true statements that might make some human connection. These tendencies that appear more and more often in our culture are not hip and cool and attractive. They are repulsive.

But I think there is hope in the end. Angelica Huston—as the boys’ mother, now a nun who has renounced earthly possessions and materialism—gives a fantastic performance as a woman possibly scared by the tendencies and egos of her own sons. And her own escape forces us to confront certain questions: is it human nature to run away from things? What does spirituality mean? How long is a journey? Is love really best expressed in the negative spaces?

I don’t rank The Darjeeling Limited among my favorite movies, let alone among my favorite Wes Anderson movies. But at the end, it makes me feel something. As the brothers run to catch their final train, they toss their luggage out into the empty landscape. I don’t think Anderson meant to imply that they have shed their emotional issues; Francis, Peter, and Jack still have a shitload of stuff to work through when this movie ends. But there does seem to be a new openness to feeling something, a new willingness to be vulnerable. A new commitment to stand on the balcony next to someone who hurt you deeply and see Paris no matter how much it hurts.

Elizabeth Wilcox is a writer and graduate student living in Los Angeles, CA. She tumbls here.

Wes Anderson Week: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

“If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.” - Ram Dass

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

by Karina Wolf

When Royal Tenenbaum is found out by his family – when they discover (not a spoiler) that in order to live with them, he’s only pretending to have stomach cancer (while eating cheeseburgers and scoffing Tic Tacs from medicine bottles) – he accepts his eviction and retreats to the 375th Street Y.  There’s something about this hyperbolically placed men’s association which locates the exact artistic terrain of The Royal Tenenbaums.

It correlates with the more modestly numbered streets of Washington Heights where you’ll find a hilly Manhattan full of shambling buildings.  The neighborhood is downtrodden and grand:  a reminder of a time when New York’s greatness was still under construction.  One of my friends, a new New Yorker, moved up there because he thought that’s where he’d find the real city.  Trying to find the real New York, of course, is like trying to live in the real Paris – the Platonic version exists only in novels and films.  The Royal Tenenbaums is, in part, a love letter to this imaginary Manhattan, a fable which lifts liberally from other renditions of the place, a Calvino-esque invention in which the streets extend to infinity.

The Tenenbaums can exist only in this magic periphery.  They are an extended family of oddities:  prodigies, addicts, hustlers, and students (of anthropology, of the Old West, of aberrant neurological disorders).  They come together when, out of financial need and petty jealousy, the patriarch fakes an illness to reclaim his home and his wife.

There is no formula to the Tenenbaums story:  Royal’s fakery is a child’s fraud, easily detected and exposed.  But his presence is enough to draw the characters together. One by one, the stunted siblings return to their childhood home and confront their troubles with family and maturity.  Chas is angry and terrified after losing his wife.  Playwright Margot is blocked, unhappily married, and having a secret affair with her childhood neighbor.  Richie has been literally afloat – wandering the seas since a breakdown on the professional tennis circuit. The rest of the story follows the characters falling apart and reconfiguring their lives.

*

The Tenenbaum’s world is a cinematic picture book.  Probably the greatest strength of Anderson as an artist is his attentiveness.  Each detail hums: the dalmation mice, the kestrel named Mordecai (which was held for ransom during the shooting), the taxidermied capybara, the closet of board games, the tent in the living room with illuminated globe and record player. This hand-drawn, low-fi quality is singular – even important – in a world of Photoshop and Autotune.  It offers an ideal of the genuine, as the product of things gleaned and reenvisioned.

Part of the pleasure of Anderson’s productions is recognizing their inspirations:  the French New Wave, the British Invasion, literature for and about children.  Like Bergman, Kubrick and Woody Allen, Anderson even employs a signature font (Futura Bold, in his case). But his works wouldn’t persist if they were only pastiche.

His world reminds me of that line from Borges’ “The Aleph”:  “Each thing…was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe.”  The viewer can relax in the contemplation of meticulous construction.  There are things we’ll never know about the narrative – the origins of conflicts and names and visual motifs – but there is an assurance that they have meaning.  Who could ask more from art than that – to impart a kind of Kabbalistic importance to every observation?

Of course, this relentless aestheticizing can raise objections.  One might say it allows Anderson to explore only the shallow end of emotions—or, at best, the depths of adolescence, a state in which many of his characters linger.  But perhaps this is most relevant:  these days the condition of youth can be indefinitely extended (or at least pretended).  Time and shifting perceptions do penetrate this chrysalis; the Tenenbaum children are traumatized in the process.

Anderson describes The Royal Tenenbaums as a film about people who peaked early, whose best years are perhaps past.  In a way, the movie interrogates the implications: childhood and genius are two cherished states in Western art and culture.  Both seem to offer a less fractured sense of self; to allow one to conquer what might otherwise be unbearable; to be celebrated for achievements and indulged in unruly behaviors.

But the Tenenbaums’ genius is more coping mechanism than gift.  Royal is a pathological father – negligent toward Chas and his adopted daughter Margot, doting upon Richie only until his failure on the tennis court.  Royal possesses the same childish vendettas and selfish goals as Rushmore’s Max Fischer.  His wounded children seem to have been formed in reaction, elaborating their own intense interests and abilities to remedy his neglect. What happens when those techniques fail?  The kind of crisis that envelops all these characters.

Anderson gets terrifically glum performances from his actors.  Margot is not just venomously funny; she is affectingly fragile and unable to help herself.  It’s certainly Paltrow’s best role.  As Royal recognizes, she is unfair to her husband and the men who love her.  Royal reproves her by saying, “You were a genius.”   She retorts, “No, I wasn’t.”  We’ll never know– it’s quite likely that her assessment is severe (she graduated valedictorian at age 12).  But maybe her comment reflects a different idea of genius, classifying it as a resident spirit that visits unpredictably.  Or maybe she’s bereft:  Margot’s strength resides in her plays and in her secrets.  Both betray her in adulthood.

Richie is the heart of the film, a silent sufferer, a less active character but one who wrestles with a moral compass. The success of the film is in Richie’s suicide attempt – his dysphoria is real, unmitigated, and without solution. When Richie reveals to Margot the stitches that lace up his veins, there is visceral discomfort.

The characters with the more evident wounds – the grieving, bristling Chas and the drug addled Eli – are the ones who can negotiate a more immediate solution to their problems.  And the wedding ending—even with car crash, dog death and an intervention—are easy fixes to Tenenbaums’ ambiguities.  The more complex characters reflect the impossible contradictions in life.  Margot and Richie’s love can be incestuous and also meaningful and pure; Royal’s narcissism can also yield generosity and nurturing.

I used to have a game: whose family out-Tenenbaumed the other?  The implications are multiple – it’s an avidly individualistic family, united (at least at the start) more by their single-minded pursuit of their own interests than by mutual affection or understanding.  But as Eli Cash, the would-be son, understands, they’re the most compelling group of dysfunctionals around.  Who wouldn’t want to be a Tenenbaum?  It’s emotionally spiky but it’s never dull.

Karina Wolf is a writer living in New York City.  She tumbls here.