The Fountain

directed by Darren Aronofsky. Warner Brothers US release, 22 November 2006

The Fountain defies characterization by genre. Aimed at arthouse audiences, it uses one actor — Hugh Jackman — to play the lead in three ambiguously related stories. Is he the same man? We're not sure. The three stories are set hundreds of years apart, but the common theme is the search for immortality, so he could be. The film won the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's annual prize for a feature film dealing with science and technology at the Hamptons International Film Festival this October. Its director, Darren Aronofsky, has previously directed Requiem for a Dream and π, a film with a mathematician as protagonist.

In a biosphere bubble in the future, Hugh Jackman's character in The Fountain accepts the idea of death. Credit: WARNER BROS PICTURES

In one of The Fountain's three strands, a scientist (Jackman) races to find a drug that will stop the growth of brain tumours before his wife (Rachel Weisz) dies of one. In dramatizing this situation, Aronofsky compresses into about four minutes the whole process of drug discovery, from lead identification right through primate testing. In scenes that intentionally call to mind TV hospital dramas, lab-coated scientists whirl around barking jargon at each other, their eyes wide with earnest concentration.

Here, a researcher in the audience might think, is science finally presented as the dramatic and compelling endeavour it is. The film makes science look sexy, and without wholly departing from actual lab realities. Indeed, the film was co-written by Ari Handel, who has a PhD in neurology but left the academic track to make films with his college room-mate, Aronofsky. Handel's job was to keep an eye on accuracy. At one point, the hero's boss snaps at him for testing a drug on a monkey on a whim, saying: “The NIH could shut us down.” On the other hand, the lab in the film is ridiculously stylish and tidy, but then Hollywood always gives characters apartments they couldn't possibly afford too.

The film is not really about science, but rather attitudes to death. In the first strand, Jackman plays a Spanish conquistador who hopes to use Christianity to cheat death, which is wrong, wrong, wrong, the film says. And it is the Jackman character in the third segment who, while flying through space in an attractive biosphere bubble and working on his weightless tai chi, figures out that the appropriate response to death is acceptance. For those who are impatient with modern, diffuse spirituality, this comes across as pretty silly stuff.

Back in the central science strand, Jackman's character says: “Death is a disease just like any other, and there is a cure and I will find it.” But here we are seeing one of the oldest tropes about scientists played out yet again: the scientist as an allegorical figure of hubris.