Father Stu - Videos, Soundtrack, Clips, Interviews

 

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack from the drama film Father Stu (2022). The score music by Dickon Hinchliffe (The Lost Daughter, At Any Price, Misbehaviour).

Source: Father Stu Movie

Genre: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Music by Dickon Hinchliffe & Various Artists

Label: Sony Music

Format: Digital

Release Date: April 13, 2022

Father Stu (also known as simply Stu) is a 2022 American drama film written and directed by Rosalind Ross, produced by Columbia Pictures, distributed by Sony Pictures. The film stars Mark Wahlberg, Jacki Weaver, Mel Gibson, Teresa Ruiz, Niko Nicotera, Cody Fern, Chiquita Fuller, and Carlos Leal.

Father Stu is set to premiere in the US on 13th April 2022.

The soundtrack album will be available for listening/purchasing on Amazon and Apple Music stores.

Father Stu: Montana Priest and Knight of Columbus

Tracklisting

1. Father Stu (2:24)
2. Wildest Dreams (0:53)
3. Remember Me (1:20)
4. Carmen (0:57)
5. Bill’s Truck (1:33)
6. Come and Get It (2:26)
7. Father and Son (1:11)
8. Mary (1:45)
9. Resisting Arrest (1:07)
10. You Ain’t That Lucky (1:39)
11. You’re Wrapped (1:22)
12. I’m Doing This (0:48)
13. The Return (1:47)
14. Roommates (1:27)
15. Bill’s Trailer (0:58)
16. Ordained (1:19)
17. Big Sky (1:31)
18. Ain’t the Hill to Die On (1:45)
19. Leaving (1:21)
20. My Support (1:05)
21. Late Bloomers (3:18)

I never read film reviews or watch trailers before watching a flick. With Father Stu it would have totally destroyed the story and its many surprises. Below is a compilation of Wahlberg's newest role including select interviews. Hence, bookmark this page but go first to see the film before looking at the site.

Secondly, two scenes to pay especial attention to: the bar scene and the dining scene at the apartment. They are central foci to all the before-and-after of Father Stu's life. Enjoy.

- re slater

Father Stu - Official Trailer

Brett Young - Long Way Home (From The Motion Picture “Father Stu” / Lyric Video)

FATHER STU – You Don’t Know Stu | Path to Priesthood

Mark Wahlberg and Bishop Barron Discuss "Father Stu"

Friends remember Father Stu ahead of film release

Mark Wahlberg on Conversation with Cardinal Dolan

* * * * * * * *

Soundtrack Site

https://soundtrack-x.com/father-stu

Dear Readers. I did not have the time to review every video here but if there are any video duplicates please mention them to me so I may strike them out. 

 

Denzel Washington's Interview on the Film "Macbeth"

MACBETH

The Irish Times

Actor Denzel Washington stars alongside Frances

McDormand in Joel Coen’s new film version of Macbeth

by Maureen Dowd

Dec 7, 2021

The Tragedy of Macbeth - Official Trailer (2021)

Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand

Sep 21, 2021

Explaination of Shakespeare Macbeth

Shakespeare - The Tragedy of Macbeth: "A Play for Our Times"

Reviews of Coen's Adaptation of Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth Is a Frighteningly Good Shakespeare Movie

Is ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ (2021) Movie Based on a True Story?

Explained, Ending & Review Of ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ (2021) Movie

The Tragedy of Macbeth Ending, Explained

‘The Tragedy of Macbeth': How Joel Coen Diverged From Shakespeare’s Classic Verse

* * * * * * *

Denzel Washington: ‘In heaven there are two

lines. I’m interested in being in the short one’

Denzel Washington photographed by Dana Scruggs/New York Times

The Irish Times

When Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand began rehearsing to play the Macbeths, he asked her how she thought the couple had met. Oh, she replied blithely, the Macbeths met when they were 15. They were Romeo and Juliet, but they didn’t take their own lives. They just stayed married for 50 years. But they didn’t have any kids and his career stalled, so, thinking legacy, they suddenly went gangster and killed their nice, old friend, the king.

“This is one of the only good marriages in Shakespeare,” says Joel Coen, who adapted and directed The Tragedy of Macbeth, which opens just after Christmas. “They just happen to be plotting a murder.”

James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University, backs up the director, adding dryly, “But there’s not much competition, is there? The Capulets? Richard II and his nameless queen? Richard III and the doomed widow, Anne?”

Coen and McDormand, who are married and who met on the Coen brothers’ debut feature, the 1984 film noir Blood Simple, have teamed up with Washington to do another noir, the Scottish saga of “Blood will have blood.”

Denzel Washington. Photograph: Dana Scruggs/The New York Times

As in all film noirs, the guy is a sap and the lady is trouble. Lady Macbeth pushes her husband into killing Duncan by taunting him about his manhood. When you watch McDormand – who defied all Hollywood odds to became a soaring star in middle age, specialising in playing women who, as she puts it, “are not necessarily redeemable” – you absolutely believe she has the will for regicide.

Mirroring the plot of Macbeth, McDormand pestered her reluctant husband until he gave in and agreed to direct the movie – without his (also reluctant) brother, Ethan, no less.

“Frances McDormand is a beast,” Washington says, admiringly. A few weeks into filming, she asked her leading man if she had earned the right to call him D, as some close to him do. “Sure,” he replied. Coen was amazed at what it was like to work with the pair, an old-school Hollywood match-up of titans. “They are such powerful, intuitive and fascinating performers,” he says. “You were just floored by what happened on the set.” He shot in a square “academy” format, so it’s all about the faces of Washington and McDormand filling the frame.

I’m more interested in directing because I’m more interested in helping others. What I do, what I make, what I made – all of that – is that going to help me on the last day of my life? It’s about, Who have you lifted up? Who have we made better?

“The three of us are at the top of our game,” McDormand says. “Denzel’s 66. I’m 64. Joel is 67. We’re still taking risks. We’re still willing to fall flat on our faces. Working with Denzel was delicious because of all those things.” It was a tricky artistic three-way. She says her husband had to trust that “Denzel and I weren’t going to gang up on him as actors”, and Denzel had to trust that she and Joel “weren’t going to be too intimate as husband and wife”.

Over coffee at a midtown Manhattan hotel, the morning after the movie’s premiere at the New York Film Festival, Washington looks casual in black Under Armour sweats but seems beat. He says he has had very little sleep. He has just put the final touches on a film he directed, A Journal for Jordan, the true story of the romance between Dana Canedy, a former New York Times reporter and editor, and Sgt Charles Monroe King, a soldier who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, after meeting their infant son only once. It stars Michael B Jordan and Chanté Adams, and opens in Ireland in late January.

“It’s just a beautiful story of loss and love,” Washington says, “a story about real heroes and sacrificing, men and women who have given their lives so that we have the freedom to complain.” (The star, who has played a policeman more than a dozen times, recently made similar comments of respect for cops who put their lives on the line.)

He says that before his 97-year-old mother died, a few months ago, he promised her that he would “attempt to honour her and God by living the rest of my days in a way that would make her proud. So that’s what I’m trying to do.”

“I’m more interested in directing because I’m more interested in helping others,” he says. “What I do, what I make, what I made – all of that – is that going to help me on the last day of my life? It’s about, Who have you lifted up? Who have we made better?

“This is spiritual warfare. So I’m not looking at it from an earthly perspective. If you don’t have a spiritual anchor, you’ll be easily blown by the wind and you’ll be led to depression.” Sounding like his father, a Pentecostal minister who died in 1991 – “That’s what got my father, he couldn’t give up the meat and fried foods” – Washington asks me: “Have you read the Bible? Start with the New Testament, because the Old Testament is harder. You get caught up in the who-begot-who-begot-who thing.”

If they see you free all week, they won’t pay to see you on the weekend. I don’t tweet. I don’t have Instagram. I embrace my inner analogue

He says he wants to mentor young actors like Jordan, Adams and Corey Hawkins, who did an acclaimed turn as Dr Dre in Straight Outta Compton, and now plays Macduff, the lord who beheads Macbeth.

Washington talks about working with Chadwick Boseman last year on his final film, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Even before he met Boseman, Washington had agreed to Phylicia Rashad’s request to help pay the young actor’s tuition, along with eight other students at Howard University, to go to a summer acting programme in England.

“He was a brave young man, strong, and he had a strong woman next to him,” Washington says. “Once, I remember going in the trailer and thinking, Something is going on there. I didn’t know what it was. Nobody did. Bless him. He kept it to himself and did his job. But he needed the time between takes to get his energy back.”

Hawkins says that he sometimes prayed with Washington on the Macbeth set in Burbank, California. “Sometimes we get talking, and you see the preacher in him,” the younger actor says. “He’s just a natural-born charismatic leader who is not afraid to talk about his own faults or misgivings or shortcomings.”

Washington was eager to go to directing school under Coen, saying, “Joel is just a genius, focused.” Alex Hassell, a British actor who plays a Scottish royal, Ross, as a “sexy Rasputin”, says Washington often pressed Coen to explain his technique. “Denzel would be asking, ‘Why this? Why that?’ He was so excited to get to work with Joel.” Hassell says Washington could go so “deep in his cortex” that watching him was hypnotic, and he would sometimes forget to act.

“I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, oh, hang on. I was supposed to be there as well.’ It might have just been him coming out of a tent. There is some quality that some people have which you just want to bottle.”

I read Washington a quotation from Maya Angelou: “Denzel Washington appears to me a classical contradiction,” she said in the March 1994 issue of Ebony magazine. “He is totally contained as a vault of rare gems and is as totally accessible as air.”

I don’t know what Hollywood thinks. It’s not like it’s a bunch of people who get together on Tuesdays

He smiles, saying: “Beats a sharp stick in the eye, I guess.” I wonder how he maintains an air of mystery in this oversharing era. “If they see you free all week, they won’t pay to see you on the weekend,” the star says. “I don’t tweet. I don’t have Instagram. I embrace my inner analogue.”

I tell Washington he is so peerless at speaking Shakespearean verse in a conversational way that he could be the love child of John Gielgud and Spencer Tracy. “That’s 45 years of training,” he says. When he was growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, a mentor told him: “Your natural ability will only take you so far.” With that in mind, after playing Othello at Fordham, he started searching for a school that would give him a foundation in the classics and ended up attending graduate school at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

“The whole thing with Joel and Fran was they wanted ‘No stick-up-the-butt Shakespeare,’” Washington says. They wanted “dope Shakespeare,” Hawkins adds. Todd Black, Washington’s producing partner, who worked with him on the movie versions of August Wilson’s Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, says, “His whole thing with young people is ‘Don’t act.’ He will stop an audition cold and say, ‘You’re acting, please don’t act.’ He always checks their resumes to see if they’ve done theatre.”

I ask Washington if Hollywood had become more diverse after #OscarsSoWhite. “Hollywood is a street,” he says. “I live in Los Angeles. I don’t live in Hollywood. I don’t know what Hollywood thinks. It’s not like it’s a bunch of people who get together on Tuesdays.”

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Photograph: Alison Cohen Rosa/A24

When the New York Times’s movie critics put Washington atop their list of the greatest 25 actors of the 21st century (so far), Manohla Dargis said that his dominance “is a corrective and rebuke to the racist industry in which he works”.

“Okay,” he says, chuckling, when I ask him about it. “You know, put the work out there and then people decide it’s this, it’s that.” There were some who thought that, after the Black Lives Matter protests, having a black Macbeth would cause the play to resonate in a different way. At the start Washington asked Coen about the black and white of it all. But it turned out he was just asking the director whether he was going to film in black and white. Washington believes that if you look at everything through the lens of a political agenda, you lose the plot as an artist.

The director and his stars wanted to make a Macbeth that was universal, not topical. McDormand tells me she was not interested in modern interpretations of Macbeth as an emblem of toxic masculinity or in correcting the stereotype of Lady Macbeth as a harridan. “It’s banal” to make Shakespeare politically correct, she sniffs. “It’s bigger than that.” But the casting still makes a difference.

A fan approachs Hawkins to tell him how amazing it was to see two black actors, representing good and evil – Macduff and Macbeth – in the final, searing sword battle on a bridge.

Coen goes for abstraction and chiaroscuro in the movie. Besides removing colour, all the costumes and sets are stripped of ornamentation. The gray gloaming and hallucinatory mists envelop a spare and savage landscape, with the witches shape shifting into three black birds.

The disorienting first scene features the whispery, scratchy voice of the staggering British actor Kathryn Hunter, who plays one witch divided into three; she sounds as if she’s gurgling blood.

I’m a God-fearing man. I try not to worry. Fear is contaminated faith.

It’s Coen’s first cinematic adventure since his brother traded the silver screen for the stage – “Of course, I missed him,” Joel Coen tells me – and he doesn’t want us to know if we’re in Macbeth’s wild mind or on the wild moors. “It’s the essence of Joel, I have to say,” McDormand says. The director was careful about fiddling with the verse, noting, “You don’t want to sing the song without the melody.” In keeping with the vision of a “postmenopausal” Macbeth, they did change a line Macbeth speaks to his wife: “Bring forth men-children only/For thy undaunted mettle should compose/Nothing but male.” “Should compose” has become “should have composed.”

“They’re a couple at the end of their ambition, not at the beginning of their ambition,” McDormand says. “In our interpretation, she starts realising that she’s become expendable, and that’s what drives her insane, not the fact that they kill Duncan and there’s blood on her hands. She’s given up her soul to the dark forces, and he’s not confiding in her any more. He’s not asking for her help.”

The actor says that, for her and D, their long marriages provided insight: “Denzel and Pauletta have been married as long as Joel and I have. We had to learn how to be parents together and life partners together because it’s an ever-changing landscape.”

Coen says he wasn’t scared of the Macbeth curse “until Covid shut us down on Friday the 13th in March 2020”. But Washington was never worried. “I’m a God-fearing man,” he says. “I try not to worry. Fear is contaminated faith.” Unlike some other top movie stars, Washington is just as comfortable playing villains, antiheroes and deeply flawed men as he is portraying heroes. If there was ever any pressure on him, as there was on leading black actors like Sidney Poitier, to choose saintly, role-model parts rather than demonic, criminal parts, he ignored it.

Denzel changed my life. To be 30 and get to work with one of the greats of all time? I’ve never seen anybody be a flat-out better storyteller. He knows what the audience is thinking. He knows how to surprise them

“What he decides he will do, he will do,” says Brian Grazer, who produced Washington’s hits American Gangster and Inside Man. “What he decides he won’t do, he won’t do.” The actor is nonpareil at playing lethal and unpredictable. His eyes can go dead and scary, full of razor blades, even as he offers that magnetic smile. In life, as in art, Grazer says, you know that this is not a guy you want to mess with. Washington was chilling as the bodyguard out for revenge in the 2004 film Man on Fire, and as the sociopathic narcotics cop Alonzo Harris in the 2001 thriller Training Day, for which he won an Oscar.

“Training Day, I ad-libbed, like, 50 per cent of what you hear,” Washington says. Its director, Antoine Fuqua, used real Los Angeles gang members named Bone, Killer and Hitman as extras. “We had a lot of real folks that had done real things, so I used those people. I learned from those people.”

Ethan Hawke, who was taken on a terrifying ride as Jake Hoyt, Washington’s tyro partner in that film, recalls the actor’s threat of violence. “It was like playing music with Miles Davis or baseball with Babe Ruth,” says Hawke, who was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role. “Denzel changed my life. To be 30 and get to work with one of the greats of all time? I’ve never seen anybody be a flat-out better storyteller. He knows what the audience is thinking. He knows how to surprise them. His imagination is so thorough.

“The greats can play offence and defence, and most people can’t. Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman and Denzel manage to be equally compelling as protagonist and antagonist.”

Washington’s other costars are equally effusive. Meryl Streep talks to me about his “mesmeric power over an audience” onstage. Tom Hanks says, about their dazzling duet in Philadelphia, “I sat beside him for three weeks shooting the trial. I had no dialogue. It was a thriller of an acting class. He follows no rules but pursues the moment. No nonsense, but a looseness that can’t be faked. A one-on-one scene with him is a game of hardball catch – he is both daring you to keep up and propelling you to do more.

“He is our Brando. Nicholson. Olivier. And, like me, he steals office supplies and notebooks from the set dressing.” Hanks recalls that, at one point on the set, “we were talking about our New York City days as broke actors – about the same age, peers, trying to learn craft and get work. I noted that we were in the same boat at the same time. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But you could catch a cab in Manhattan.’”

Denzel Washington. Photograph: Dana Scruggs/The New York Times

Those who know Washington say he can be guarded; he can be suspicious of putting himself in others’ hands, or of being taken out of context because he doesn’t want to play into someone else’s narrative. He keeps it low key, driving himself places without a posse. He isn’t a regular on the Hollywood party scene.

Actors who work with him are never sure where they stand. He can be charming or elusive but not buddy-buddy.

“I did not try to be his friend, hang out at a Lakers game or go to birthday parties,” Hawke says. “I just wanted to offer him my best.”

Melissa Leo has worked with him in three movies – Flight and two of the Equalizer films – and still calls him Mr Washington. McDormand agrees: “He’s actually a really lovely human being, but he does really need to protect his process. He has a very trusted team of people that he’s worked with for years, that was his pod.”

When Liev Schreiber starred with Washington in The Hurricane, he says, he expected a friendly Denzel and got a prickly Hurricane instead. “I thought he really hated me,” Schreiber says. But, later, he got a call from Jonathan Demme about appearing in The Manchurian Candidate remake with Washington, who had pushed for him. “I was completely shocked by that,” Schreiber says. But, he adds, Washington plumbs such dangerous and painful depths as an actor that small talk could be distracting. “I never worked with an actor who seemed to care more.”

Grazer says Washington told him that he wouldn’t play Frank Lucas in American Gangster unless the Harlem murderer and drug trafficker was shown paying for his crimes in the end.

Bruno Delbonnel, the French cinematographer for The Tragedy of Macbeth, says he is accustomed to being the first on set at 5am, so he was surprised to see Washington beating him there. “Denzel was there, always,” he said. “It was a competition between him and me. He tried to beat me, because he was rehearsing alone for an hour or so on set with no light. Just himself walking on set and trying to have a feeling of what he could do.”

Washington and Ethan Hawke in Training Day (2004) Photograph: Warner Bros

Washington doesn’t whine. Spike Lee made his displeasure clear when Washington lost the Oscar in 1993 for his stunning performance in Malcolm X to Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman, but Washington said graciously that if he had won, “I would have felt badly. It was Pacino’s time.”

When he accepted the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 2019, it was clear that he was getting more publicly spiritual. He called himself a vessel of God and played an old video of his late father-in-law talking about how we must love and care for one another. He talked disdainfully about the “Twitter-tweet-meme-mean world that we’ve created” and said we’d better do our best to “turn this thing around” for young people.

He continued this theme at our coffee. “The enemy is the inner me,” he says. “The Bible says in the last days – I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know – but it says we’ll be lovers of ourselves. The No 1 photograph today is a selfie, ‘Oh, me at the protest.’ ‘Me with the fire.’ ‘Follow me.’ ‘Listen to me.’

“We’re living in a time where people are willing to do anything to get followed. What is the long- or short-term effect of too much information? It’s going fast and it can be manipulated obviously in a myriad of ways. And people are led like sheep to slaughter.”

In heaven, he says, “there are going to be two lines, the long line and the short line, and I’m interested in being in the short line.” He advises me to read the Daily Word, an inspirational message that has an app. (As I write, the daily word is “compassion.”)

“You have to fill up that bucket every morning,” he says. “It’s rough out there. You leave the house in the morning. Here they come, chipping away. By the end of the day, you’ve got to refill that bucket. We know right from wrong.” As he leaves, he turns back to remind me: “Get that Daily Word.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times

*The Tragedy of Macbeth opens in Ireland on Monday, December 27th

Film Review - Annihilation: Death or ReBirth?

A n n i h i l a t i o n
by R.E. Slater

pressed into the viscous space

at once consumed, conformed,

transformed, all become one

joining vacuous light

free time skips, stops, skips again
shimmering, ethereal shapes
surrounding spellbound travellers

infiltrating broken selves

mutant airs silence all living
strange creation abounds
devolution in real time

tearing, ripping, binding

fearful symmetry flows
across organic spaces

deadly silence stilling

all once alive

R.E. Slater

January 3, 2020

rev. December 3, 2021

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

Watching Annihilation provided a lot of commentary in my head related to species self-destruction and survival, personal upheaval and pain, ecological resets, necessary random, chaotic cycles inserted into ordered systems, and all of the above when describing God, self, the human condition, creation, and so forth. Relevancy22 is an attempt to restart theological discussions in light of contemporary sciences and philosophies as they lead the way towards "re-refracting" our interior spirits and beliefs outwards-and-inwards to what is necessary in face of the blind, unhelpful dead-ends we seem to find ourselves in which continually marks our human experience. And it is in the spirit of burning down (sic, pyrotheology) what we think we know to relearn what is unseen which Annihilation repeatedly addresses through its timeless evolving script. In the end, when disorder is inserted into our present (and therefore, our past) contexts it leaves us as other than ourselves - as reflected mirrors of our former selves - forever changed by personal or societal experience, either for better or for worse. As a theologian I chose the later against all other options however paradoxical it might seem at the moment as such moments are moments of becoming rather than merely existing, of evolving rather than dying, as re-synching with the God of the universe held in its infinitely looped prism-like processes reflecting unconcluded journeys of creational space, the deaths of self, and the births of becoming. Enjoy.

R.E. Slater

December 31, 2019

Annihilation Official Trailer

Film Reviews & Explanations

Collider - https://collider.com/annihilation-movie-explained/

The Verge - https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/23/17042290/annihilation-review-natalie-portman-oscar-isaac-alex-garland-jeff-vandermeer

Vulture - https://www.vulture.com/2018/02/annihilation-movie-ending-explained.html

Digital Spy - https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a852095/netflix-annihilation-explained-ending-spoilers/

Den of Geek - https://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/annihilation/271159/annihilation-ending-explained

Annihilation EXPLAINED: Character, Theme and Story Analysis

Additional References - Click here

Wrap - Up

Annihilation and Ex Machina director Alex Garland on using sci-fi to explore self-destruction - 

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17029500/annihilation-ex-machina-director-alex-garland-sci-fi

Film Review - The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky (actors: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz)

‘The Fountain’ Has Nothing to Do with Time

http://collider.com/the-fountain-explained/#image

BY MATT GOLDBERG

NOVEMBER 22, 2016

I adore Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. It’s one of my all-time favorite films. I get something new from it every time I watch it, and I watch it at least once a year. I’ve listened to Clint Mansell’s score countless times. The film features Aronofsky at his most earnest and operatic, and while the film flopped when it was released ten years ago, it has gone on to gain a cult following.

However, there also seems to be a common misconception with how the film approaches its narrative. It’s a problem that likely began with the film’s trailer:

As you can see from the trailer, it lays out the three narratives as existing in three time periods: 1500, 2000, and 2500. So if you saw the trailer, you would assume that’s how Aronofsky structured his film. While it’s clear that what’s happening in “1500” is Isabel Creo’s (Rachel Weisz) story “The Fountain” about a conquistador who travels to find The Fountain of Youth in order to empower his Queen, and that in the year 2000, Tommy Creo (Hugh Jackman) is a scientist searching to find a cure for his wife’s illness, we’re left to assume that in the year 2500, “Tom Creo” (as he’s referred to in the credits) is now traveling in a spaceship of some kind with the tree that has allowed him to extend his life.

But that’s not actually what’s happening, and the “future” Tom Creo isn’t in the future at all. There’s nothing in the film itself to suggest that the year is 2500 or a future of any kind. In fact, all of the evidence points to something far richer but more complicated: The Tom Creo we see in the bubble is Tommy Creo’s mind.

It’s understandable that some people would think The Fountain is a story that deals with time. Some have even gone so far as to create a “linear” cut that puts the film in “chronological” order. And I get that. If this is a story about The Fountain of Youth, then one would assume that a character who discovered The Fountain in the form of the Tree of Life, would be living in the distant future.

Except The Fountain isn’t about The Fountain of Youth. It’s about death and creation and reconciling the two. The film even takes time to point out how the two are intertwined when Isabel talks about Xibalba:

Izzi: This is an actual Mayan book. It explains the Creation myth. You see that’s first father. He’s the very first human.

Tommy Creo: Hum. Is he dead?

Izzi: He sacrificed himself to make the world.

[pause]

Izzi: That’s the tree of life bursting out of his stomach.

Tommy Creo: Hey, come.

Izzi: Listen. His body became the trees’ roots. They spread and formed the earth. His soul became the branches rising up forming the sky. All the remained is first father’s head. His children hung in in the heavens creating Xibalba.

Tommy Creo: Xibalba. The star, eh,

[corrects himself]

Tommy Creo: Nebula.

Izzi: So what do you think?

Tommy Creo: About?

Izzi: That idea. Death as an act of creation.

For Tommy, a doctor who has dedicated himself to stopping death, he can’t fathom how death could be an act of creation. After Izzi dies, he angrily tells Dr. Lillian Guzetti (Ellen Burstyn), “Death is a disease, it’s like any other. And there’s a cure. A cure – and I will find it.”

The arc of The Fountain isn’t about a man who found The Fountain of Youth or The Tree of Life, ate its bark, and lived to be over 500 years old so that he could rejuvenate the Tree in a dying star. To assume that the scenes in space bubble are literally happening deprives The Fountain of its central conflict, which is about Tommy accepting death and using that to fuel the creation of finishing Isabel’s novel.

When we see Tom Creo in the bubble interacting with Izzi, they’re not preludes to flashbacks. They’re thoughts interfering in Tom’s mind. For Tom, he can’t finish Isabel’s novel because to do so would be to accept her death. “Finish it,” are the worst words to him because if the novel is unfinished, then Isabel’s work, and by proxy Isabel, lives on. He literally can’t close the book on their relationship even though her dying wish was for him to finish the novel.

The climax of the film is Tom learning to accept death, something he has refused to do throughout the story because it’s too painful. When he finally accepts it, we see Tom Creo interact with Tomas’ storyline in the novel “The Fountain”. That scene isn’t Tom teleporting back in time to reveal himself as “First Father” to the Chieftain. What we’re witnessing is an act of creation. Tommy (in the present day) is finishing the story, and the “future” Tom is his mind penning that creation. He changes Izzi’s ending, which had the Chieftain killing Tomas and instead the Chieftain sacrifices himself in the presence of a figure he believes to be “First Father”.

What Aronofsky is showing us isn’t a guy in the distant future getting hit by an exploding nebula. He’s showing us in the abstract the act of accepting death and how it can lead to creation. Tom is now penning the end of “The Fountain” where Tomas reaches The Tree of Life, greedily drinks its sap to heal his wounds, and then is overwhelmed by the power of the Fountain, and dies in its thrall. Like Isabel’s story, it’s autobiographical. She began it as a tale about a woman hoping that her beloved could save her, but Tommy ends it almost as a mea culpa. For Tommy, Tomas is undone—much like he was—by refusing to accept death and chasing eternal life at his own peril.

Of course, how do you sell that in a 2-minute, 27-second trailer? How do you tell audiences, “Hey, all this cool stuff with bald Hugh Jackman in a bubble going through space? That’s actually an abstract representation of the character’s mind as he learns to accept death and finish his late wife’s novel. Coming soon to a theater near you!” It’s much easier to say, “Yeah, this is just three time periods. Roll with it.”

It was an easy sell that did a disservice to the story Aronofsky was trying to tell. While some may argue that The Fountain romanticizes the ugliness of death, it could also be argued that raging against the inevitable shortens our lives in ways we can’t perceive. Instead of enjoying the first snow with the person we love the most, we push them away because we can’t face the pain their death will bring. For The Fountain, we can only move forward after we’re willing to embrace the end.