Seems like all of a sudden, movies have entered my personal spotlight. I just finished transcribing an article written by Shift editor Matthew Gilbert called
Movies on a Mission. And today I read two good reviews by Robert Masters, on
The Fountain, and Jet Li's
Fearless.
The RAM reviews follow:
THE FOUNTAIN
I don't think I've ever disagreed so strongly with so many movie critics over a film. Their distaste for and dismissal of Darren Aronofsky's latest work,
The Fountain, was not really all that surprising, given that it's a film that cannot be truly appreciated, let alone sufficiently resonated with, unless one has already spent some quality time in spiritual bootcamp investigating - and not just intellectually - core issues like the nature of identity, love, being, and death, not to mention the means through which these can best be explored.
My guess is that if most of the critics who trashed
The Fountain were to be presented, in all sincerity and minimal superficiality, with the question: "Who are you?" (a warmup for "
What are you?"), their answer would probably be to supply their name and perhaps occupation. If pressed further, the result would likely be not more in-depth or mind-transcending responses, but rather only a turning away from or ridiculing of the question, as if it were just some sort of sophomoric navel-gazing exercise. Yet the very immaturity that they might attribute to such an enterprise simply exposes their immaturity and adulterated take on topics that
really matter.
Those who have not significantly explored their own depths - psychological, spiritual, emotional, and otherwise - are probably going to toss
The Fountain into the same bin as
What The Bleep Do We Know,
What Dreams May Come, and other such movies (whether they liked them or not), confusing the regressively unitive and otherwise prerational elements of such films with the transrational (and transegoic) elements of
The Fountain.
There is an ecstatic dimension - sometimes shatteringly, heartbreakingly beautiful - that emerges throughout
The Fountain which is very different than conventional spiritual upliftment. My heart felt ripped open and raw watching much of it, while deep grief and an equally deep joy coursed through me, as if in fully embodied recognition of what we truly are. Instead of just providing some fascinating information (data-fodder, mystical and otherwise, for the mind) or a tasty bit of spiritualized entertainment,
The Fountain provides us with a potentially transformative opportunity, through our unguarded participation in its multidimensional poetics, as well as its often epiphanous intimacy with the inherent paradoxes of Life.
Like good poetry,
The Fountain doesn't explain, but
reveals. It raises profound questions, and offers something more real than answers. This may be an irritant to film critics who are busy doing time in their
headquarters, but is a sublime balm, Life-affirming and succulently transcendent, to those who have begun to awaken to their true nature.
In
The Fountain an edge is played that most other "spiritual" films don't go near or even acknowledge, an edge that doesn't console or provide spiritual robes for the conventional self, but that instead shakes it to the core before blasting it far beyond what can be imagined. This edge, lined with reality-unlocking implications, is touched, at least in its darker dimensions, by a few other films, such as
Mulholland Drive, but
The Fountain dares to bring deep relational love into it, without slipping into romanticism, spiritual and otherwise. The agony of love when death comes nearer than is wanted is honored as much as the bliss of love when everything lines up, even as a deeper love, a death transcending love, is allowed to arise slowly but surely from the debris of all this, in eloquently nuanced detail and flow.
Film critics who viewed most of the offerings of so-called spiritual cinema would probably be turned off by the terminally sweet tone, simplistic patter, shadow bypassing, and one-dimensional acting that pervades many of these. But to toss such lightweight, spiritually sentimental films into the same bin as
The Fountain simply indicates an inability to distinguish pop spirituality from a deeper spirituality.
And what is that deeper spirituality? First of all, it cannot be known through merely rational means, however much the rational mind presumes to know it. Film critics who are identified with or holed up in their thinking minds, unquestioningly believing themselves to be who they think they are and confusing cleverness with intelligence, can only see prerational spirituality (that is, intellectually childish, superstitious, overly ritualistic spirituality), and so lump all spirituality into the same prerational basket, much as Freud famously did with religion, labeling it with facile ease as "New Age" or as some kind of metaphysical mush or babble.
The love in
The Fountain is an ever-intensifying mix of everyday love, big love, and supreme love, unburdened by the solemnly clich?d pronouncements (i.e., "we're all one" or "we're all connected") and sugary excesses that often pollute spiritual cinema. The agony and the ecstasy are both very much present - and heart-rippingly easy to feel -along with a sense of tacit revelation that I found incredibly moving.
And threading through all of it is the presence of death, on many levels. Death that is fought, death that is the opposite of Life, death that is the enemy, death that is a disease, death that is but a doorway, death that serves and deepens Life, death that makes possible a deeper Life, death that enriches love and Love. There is so, so much that the protagonist (masterfully played by Hugh Jackman) is dying to see, and through him, through his struggle, his trio of apparent lifetimes, we become more intimate with what we are dying to see. And dying to be.
The Fountain invites us to die into a deeper Life - not through some kind of teaching or transmission of information, but through wholeheartedly participating in the journey of the protagonist and his wife (beautifully played by Rachel Weisz). We are then less spectators watching a movie, and more initiates in a temple of revelation. And why not? Why can't cinema serve our awakening?
To really get into this, we have to get naked, showing up in (and as) undressed Being, allowing ourselves a second innocence, an awakened innocence that strips us of our knowledge and automated certainties and deposits us in the Open Secret of the hyperbole-transcending Mystery of our existence. If our mouth drops open, so be it; if our buttoned-up case of mistaken identity starts to give up the ghost, so be it; if we're brought to our knees, and prayer becomes not something we do but are, so be it.
Yes,
The Fountain is just a movie, but it is also that rarest of creatures, a movie that has the power to transport us not just into the mystical but
through the mystical, taking us into what we never really left, but only dreamt we did. Use it as a catalyst for touching what matters most of all; I can assure you that it is clean, free of harmful additives, non-addictive, and worth revisiting.
FEARLESS:
I just saw Jet Li's new (and reputedly final) film, "Fearless." From an early age, Li's character (real-life Chinese martial arts legend Huo Yuanjia) is obsessed with defeating opponents, at whatever cost. This began with him being humiliated by another boy, who easily crushed him in a fight. No matter how great his victories, he is not satisfied; he is obsessed with having power over. When a rival martial arts master apparently wrongs him, Jet Li's character seeks him out and does battle with him, not just to win, but to destroy him. The epitome of righteous vengeance. Only with the great tragedy that follows this is he knocked off course, and deposited in a new life, one of unadorned ordinariness and natural humility.
In his broken state, he gradually learns to flow with this, eventually becoming very at home with it. His inner war is over, so that when he eventually returns to combat -- for a very different purpose than before -- he is no longer seeking power over, but rather a resolution that dishonors no one. As much as I enjoy watching Mixed Martial Arts (UFC and PrideFC) fighters striving to overpower each other -- in the raw adrenaline rush of weaponless combat -- watching Jet Li's character do battle after regaining his integrity and spiritual core stirred something much deeper in me, something about taking a stand that asks everything of us.
I'm not saying it's wrong to want to overpower another under certain conditions -- as in a fiercely competitive yet still mutually respectful game of tennis -- nor that it's wrong to exult in one's achievements at such times, but that there's a deeper game to be played, a game in which far more than our egoity is at stake.
I'm not talking here about
idiot honor -- where we're willing to trade our life or make enormous sacrifices for an ideal that we've never properly questioned or examined -- but about doing what honors our very being. There is renunciation in this -- not repression, but renunciation, a no that deepens our yes -- and there is also tremendous freedom, the kind of freedom that is found
through limitation. Earlier in the film, Jet Li's character is diminished by things not going his way; later, nothing can diminish him.
This kind of heroism -- call it being-centered heroism -- is timeless, and therefore always timely. When another embodies it, we are, to whatever degree, naturally touched, no matter how small, old, or frail that person may be. The image of Ramana Maharshi (from black-and-white footage shot in the 1940s) hobbling along on arthritic limbs, even as his whole being is smiling, comes to mind, moving me not because he is trying to be heroic, but because he is so obviously and so
completely surrendered to the ultimate empowering act, namely the full awakening of others to their real nature.
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