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Death, Life and Brokeness:Dialoguing with “The Fountain”

Last night my wife and I watched Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. The film started Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. The visual mood set by the film was simply beautiful. The plot of the film revolves around Jackman and Weisz as they are played out in three time periods set hundreds of years apart, 1500’s, 2000’s and sometime in the distant future. I found the film enjoyable, and fortunately it had the right pacing, and was only about an hour and forty minutes in length. What struck me the most about the film was what it was saying about the human experience.
–Spoiler Alert–
The film revolves around Jackmen’s, quest to save his beloved, Weisz. At the film’s heart is one man’s war against death itself, for the Astronaut, it is reaching the center of a decaying star, for the scientist it is finding a cure for his wife’s tumor, and for the conquistador it is finding the fountain of youth. As the film develops we find out that the conquistador’s story is actually being written by Izzi as she is dying of a brain tumor, while Tom the scientist and Tom the Astronaut turn out to be the same man, Tom has found a way to prevent death but not before it has taken his wife. As the three storylines intertwine what I was left with was a sense of loss and confusion surrounding death. Aronofsky, either coincidentally or intentionally, seems to be drawing attention to the wrongness of death in our reality. In fact the only real antagonist of the film is death itself, Tom at one point speaks of death as a disease, which he will stop.
Watching this film from a Christian perspective, I could not help but relate and root for Tom to try and defeat death, yet all the while knowing that he would be unsucessful. As a christian I hate death. Death is a constant reminder that something is wrong with the world, and the universal notion that we fight against death simply verifies that an animosity towards death is not something reserved only for Christians.
As I said before, I can sympathize with the despair that Tom experiences as he watched his wife’s life slip away. Yet, as a Christian I believe that death is not some cosmic happen-stance, but a result of the sin of one man. Death is not something that tells us that God is unfair, on the contrary the Bible clearly states that God shares the same hatred of death as we do. ((2 Peter 3:9))

As I watched Tom’s fight against death become more and more futile, I began to pity him. Tom was a man who spends hundreds of years searching for a way to defeat death, and ultimately fails. At the climax of the film he comes so close and yet cannot do it.

I related so much to Tom because if I had not had a radical encounter with Jesus, my life would ultimately be a less flashy, less climactic telling of the same story–Man loves woman, man looses woman, man dies trying to regain that woman. Tom is not powerful enough to overcome death, and neither am I. Fortunately I do not have to try and fight against death, the way that Tom did. I do not have to try because someone has already overcome death in my place. Jesus did what neither I nor Tom could do, he overcame death. He did this because he loved me and knew that I could never do it, on my own.
What really struck me at the end of the film as the credits rolled and Clint Mansell’s stirring soundtrack filled the room, was the fact that there are millions of real people today, like Tom. People who are, as I type, fighting against death like the Character Tom, and all of them are coming to the same end that he came to, minus the hollywood frills.
Death is a bitter thing. It should dig at us. It should outrage us. It should stir those seeking answers to ask questions. And, it should, motivate christians, in the face of death, to cry out: “There is hope. Death is not God’s pattern, it is our mistake! Yet Jesus has done what a thousand Tom’s could never do, he has defeated death itself.”