Earlier this year I’d read some of the press about advance screenings of this film which featured accounts of audience members actually throwing their hands in the air and walking out of theaters in disgust and about how many critics had blasted the movie, claiming it was one of the worst ever made. I didn’t see the film when it was released nationally, but I did recently rent and watch a copy. While I think that the reactions mentioned above are a bit on the extreme side I can honestly say that I was highly disappointed.
The first problem is the length. The movie is scarcely over an hour and a half, not nearly enough time, at least in my opinion, to address such a weighty and ambiguous subject as how we, in our various societies and as individuals, deal with our own impending mortality.
Hugh Jackman and Rachael Weisz play two characters whose lives are irrevocably linked across time. We are first introduced to them as a conquistador named Tomas(Jackman) swears allegiance to Queen Isobel of Spain(Weisz) and vows to locate the Fountain of Youth and the Tree of Life which sprouts from it.
Jumping forward five hundred plus years, Tomas is now Dr. Thomas Creo, a physician who has been performing surgeries on a monkey with a malignant brain tumor in the hopes of finding a way to save his wife, Izzie, now in the terminal stage of cancer. He makes a decision to inject the monkey with extracts taken from an unusual tree discovered in the depths of the rain forest in South America to see if this has any effect on its tumor.
Moving ahead another five hundred plus years, Thomas is now a reluctant, troubled immortal and ascetic, haunted by the ghost of his long dead wife as he carries the Tree of Life through deep space inside a large bubble of atmosphere toward a distant nebula.
This brings me to my second problem with the movie; the seeming lack of continuity. How did Dr. Creo obtain these extracts? And why did he abruptly decide to use them to treat the monkey’s condition? The lonely, immortal Thomas and Dr. Creo seem to be one and the same. If so, how did he eventually locate the Tree of Life? What was the technology that allowed him to enclose the tree in a bubble and sling it out into space? These, to me, seem like very important story and plot points. Some are either mentioned in passing and never brought up again, some are simply not explained. True, this movie is no doubt supposed to spark deep philosophical thought and conversation but the enormous logical and intuitive leaps the filmmakers seem to expect the audience to make are just too great.
The story has great potential and should have made for an intense drama and character study but the final problem that arises, in relation to this complicated storyline, is an all-together lack of character development. Hugh Jackman and Rachael Weisz are both great, versatile performers and it’s clear that they are doing the very best they can with what they have to work with, which isn’t much. But there is no memorable dialog and the actions and reactions of the characters bear no resemblance whatsoever to the behavior of real people in those situations.
The short running length again works against the production and apprehends how much time can be spent with the characters in each time period. There’s barely enough of an opportunity to get to know them in one scene before the film jumps abruptly to the next. There is no chance to get a sense of the emotional turmoil the characters must really be experiencing and thus Tomas/Thomas and Isobel/Izzie begin to seem more like cardboard cut-outs than fully realized individuals. One finds him/herself not being able to care about what happens to them. It’s here that the brisk pace becomes compounded by confusing editing, especially toward the end. And when the three timelines begin to intersect and influence each other all cohesion goes out the window.
Having not seen either of Darren Aronofsky’s other offerings, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, I can’t speak as to his skill as a screenwriter or director but I had heard that the funding for this movie had been cut in half, leaving its budget at $70 million. This is still a handsome sum and one wonders why it wasn’t spent more wisely. Instead of concentrating so much on the look of the film, more time should have been spent on writing a more character driven story. What could have been a stirring and thoughtful meditation on how we deal with death and loss instead seems somehow self-congratulatory on the part of the filmmakers. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that they may have been a bit to clever and a bit too pleased with themselves.
