Expect to see spoilers below:

I went in to The Fountain expecting a blow-your-mind thinkfilm in the manner of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but got a small and precise film instead. This isn't a bad thing -- it's just not what I expected. (Although visually the movie was large in scope and quite beautiful.) Death is such a huge subject to tackle, and rather than go for a Babel/Traffic/Syriana-type story -- all the rage these days -- covering fear of Death in all its permutations, or even for a symbolic approach like Bergman's masterpiece The Seventh Seal, director Darren Aronofsky strips down the philosophical side of things and simply observes how two or three basic characters accept, deny, fight against, and embrace Death. As far as that goes, The Fountain is a minor accomplishment.

In the Las Vegas Weekly, local reviewer Josh Bell called The Fountain a "feature-length fortune cookie" -- peel back some of the dismissive contempt and I might agree. But take this indelible (and inedible) quote from the philosopher Spinoza, whose outlook on death as summarized by Bertrand Russell I find to be quite useful: "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death, but of life." Russell then goes on to say:

It is only death in general that should be so treated; death of any particular disease should, if possible, be averted by submitting to medical care. What should, even in this case, be avoided, is a certain kind of anxiety or terror; the necessary measures should be taken calmly, and our thoughts should, as far as possible, be then directed to other matters. The same considerations apply to all other purely personal misfortunes.

What's tragic about The Fountain is that Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman) directs his thoughts toward death entirely for hundreds of years (if you accept the sci-fi interpretation of the film, which Aronofsky seems to have intended), and only after a final, desperate moment does he assume the lotus position and embrace death. His wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz), on the other hand, has no such problems and is a Spinoza follower all the way. Her problem is with convincing her husband to feel the same way, and her eponymous fable about the conquistador Tomas is her modus operandi. A simple morality play, perhaps, and maybe its message sounds clichéd in the telling, but as David Foster Wallace is always at pains to make clear, that shouldn't take away from its veracity nor its sincerity.