Darren Aronofsky’s 2025 movie Caught Stealing is a mixtape of sorts for the idiosyncratic filmmaker, a compilation of Aronofsky fixations doubling as a back-to-basics crime thriller. It feels like something he could have scraped together in the early days of his career — as plenty of reviews pointed out, the movie is actually set during those early days, unfolding in fall 1998, a few months after the release of Aronofsky’s feature debut Pi. Like Caught Stealing, Pi also features menacing Hasidic Jews and scenes near Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
From there, attentive viewers can find elements echoed from Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (addiction issues; a trip to Brighton Beach), The Wrestler (a faded athlete), Black Swan (main character persisting in spite of a major abdominal injury), Mother! (cruel fates bedeviling a young lead), and The Whale (more addiction issues). In other words, Caught Stealing sums up almost all of his movies, except for The Fountain — the 2006 sci-fi drama (and notorious flop) that remains one of his best films, as well as a fascinating glimpse at a more fantastical path he abandoned.
The Fountain itself was nearly abandoned. An initial version of the movie, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, was nearing production with a $75 million budget in 2002 when Pitt abruptly left the project, seemingly over creative differences. A lower-cost version starring Hugh Jackman and Aronofsky’s then-partner Rachel Weisz wound up shooting three years later. The budget reduction didn’t help, nor did the Thanksgiving-week release. Audiences primed for a fall blockbuster simply weren’t especially interested in an experimental, time-jumping, metaphysical story about a man (or possibly three men, all played by Jackman) reeling from the imminent loss of his terminally ill wife.
That’s the most straightforward of the three storylines braided through The Fountain. In the seemingly modern-day thread, Dr. Tommy Creo (Jackman) experiments with a South American plant he hopes will defy human death, racing against the clock as his wife Izzi (Weisz) weakens due to a brain tumor. Aronofsky intercuts between Tommy and two additional related stories: In one, a 16th-century conquistador (also Jackman) searches for a “tree of life” in Central America at the behest of Queen Isabella (also Weisz). In another, a man in the distant future (Jackman yet again) pilots a bubble-like spacecraft carrying a tree with life-giving properties toward a star about to go supernova.
It’s never expressly stated how these two stories interlink with the main one, but the resonances between them suggest that the plant Tommy experiments with is the one the conquistador seeks, and that the future tree is another iteration of it, planted on Izzi’s grave in the present. It’s also possible that the past and future stories could be chapters from the book Izzi has started writing, and hopes Tommy will finish. It’s hard to argue with that one; broadly speaking, aren’t we all chapters in an unfinished book?
For better or worse, The Fountain mirrors that unfinished quality, sometimes feeling compromised in the process. There are only a few real characters, and strictly speaking, little that happens in any of the three storylines needs more than 10 or 15 minutes to convey. This narrative simplicity is an odd approach for a movie spanning thousands of years, but that relentless focus sets The Fountain apart from other historical epics, sci-fi adventures, or medical dramas.
It’s also an outgrowth of the style Aronofsky developed in the movie’s predecessors Pi and Requiem for a Dream, where plot is subservient to imagery, often conveyed with repetition. Those movies featured repeated montages that conveyed obsessive routines. In The Fountain, match cuts connect visually rhyming moments across time periods, like the overhead shots of Jackman staring up at the sky, or his characters facing a blinding yellowish light. In other words, we’re looking at rituals on a grander scale than personal obsession — though there’s some of that too, of course.
Aronofsky still uses recurring images in The Wrestler and Black Swan, the movies he made after The Fountain; he even matches images between the two, consciously or not, with repeated handheld shots following the films’ performer-athlete protagonists into their respective worlds. Both movies are terrific, but they use that repetition and shot-matching in a way that’s more traditionally in sync with a pared-down production: handheld shots designed to bring the audience into the characters’ point of view, grounding them in physical reality. This accessible physicality may have been a conscious reversal of the bigger-picture ambition of The Fountain — Aronofsky making a savvy post-flop decision to use even lower budgets to work with his material, rather than placing an intimate approach in constant tension with such a cosmically vast scope.
But damn, the way Aronofsky tries to fuse the bigness and smallness of The Fountain makes for such a vivid, unusual visual experience in its own right. Aronofsky’s original Pitt-vehicle budget called for some expensive set pieces (perhaps in the conquistador story?) that he ultimately nixed, and what he came up with instead is more memorable than so many pricy visual effects sequences. The future section, with a bald Jackman flying in his cosmic bubblecraft, uses wildly blown-up visuals of bacteria and chemicals to create an outer space unlike any other. It looks completely foreign to more rigorously realistic depictions of space travel via special effects, yet the psychedelic take on nature photography lends it an uncanny sense of pulsing, tactile life.
The tactility extends to Aronofsky’s experiments with body horror, again given more grounded airing in the films that followed. In The Fountain, the conquistador ingests liquid from a life-giving tree, and plants sprout from his stomach with the rapidness of time-lapse photography. The blending of these sorts of visual tricks with Jackman’s visceral performance is often stunning. (Or at least it was in theaters; The Fountain hasn’t been reissued since its original DVD and Blu-ray release in 2009, and this is a film that cries out for a 4K disc from a specialty distributor.)
Admittedly, there is something strange, rhythmically speaking, about a movie that traverses space and time, searching for the meaning of mortality, in about 90 minutes flat. On the other hand, for all of his self-seriousness, Aronofsky has never been an especially ponderous director. Only two of his nine features run over two hours: Mother! is just a hair over, while Noah does sprawl well past that mark. Those two movies are also the two Aronofsky projects The Fountain most resembles, in both their strangeness and their Biblical themes — allegorical in the former case, more literal in the latter. The Fountain falls between the two. It’s less purely symbolic than Mother!, but more elusive than Noah.
In that zone between storytelling and mythological allegory, The Fountain anticipates early-2010s millennia-spanning existential dramas like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas, though The Fountain is technically easier to follow than those two movies. (Again: far fewer people on screen.) By comparison, The Fountain is almost impatient in the way it addresses grief alongside the desperation and stubbornness of humans raging against the dying of the light. Jackman embodies this perfectly, redirecting his fierce commitment to his physical form (as Wolverine) or his song-and-dance showmanship (as in his various musicals), to the impossible task of conquering, curing, or confronting death. His counterpoint character Izzi, who gradually makes her peace with death, remains more enigmatic, as if Aronofsky can’t quite bring himself to stare her straight in the eye and come to a sense of acceptance that matches hers.
The wavering between the cosmic unity Aronofsky wants to show and what his movie can actually achieve also makes The Fountain less heavy-handed than many of his subsequent films. There’s no ambiguity about the disgust, despair, awe, and emotional release he wants the audience to feel while watching The Whale: It’s all telegraphed in a way that can feel both hectoring and leering. Even with the fleeter and more entertaining Caught Stealing, Aronofsky feels the need to bludgeon the audience with some extra violence and tragedy. Black Swan and The Wrestler, good as they are, don’t leave a vast amount of room for interpretation either.
In The Fountain, however, Aronofsky grasps at something trickier: an acceptance of death as a phase of the life cycle that we can’t truly understand, by its nature. Death isn’t the ultimate dramatic escalation (or punishment), as it is in so many of his other films. It’s hovering over the characters from the start. The uncertainty over whether the movie’s three stories literally connect, or just reflect the central storyline’s themes, positions it on the razor’s edge between enlightenment and bafflement. Aronofsky’s subsequent resets, from The Wrestler to Caught Stealing, seemed to insist that he felt sure of himself again, that he was back on terra firma. The Fountain levitates into riskier space.
The Fountain is currently streaming on Kanopy (available through many public libraries), and is available for rental or purchase on Amazon, Fandango, and other digital platforms.
