I’m going to go out on a limb and say that The Fountain is probably the most poetic, avant garde, and ambitious film Hugh Jackman has ever starred in. While Les Misérables spans a couple of generations, The Fountain spans three millennia. It also marked a bit of a crazy year for Jackman—in 2006 he was featured in a total of six films: The Fountain, The Prestige, X-Men: The Last Stand, Scoop, Flushed Away and Happy Feet. So if he was at one time an unknown commodity to movie audiences, this was the year that changed all that once and for all.
The only way this movie works emotionally, and it’s a very emotionally-driven impressionistic movie, is if we believe and invest in its central love story between the Jackman character and the one played equally wonderfully by Rachel Weisz. It’s his character, though, that is the focus of the film; it’s through him that we’re meant to try to deal with the death of a loved one, and the lengths to which we’ll go to try to reverse or prolong the inevitable. That makes the entire movie dependent on a quality that Jackman possesses which is difficult to pinpoint, but it’s just a seemingly genuine earnestness contained in every gesture and feeling that instantly makes his quest our quest. In an empathetic medium like film, being able to harness that inherent quality and manipulate one’s own emotions to move an audience is a simple act on paper but a profound one when depicted on screen in service of a story, especially one as abstract and centered on feelings as The Fountain is. Until last year, this was Hugh Jackman at his very best.
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