"The Fountain," by Darren Aronofsky, is a futuristic romantic thriller with sci-fi and historical elements that blend into a trippy meditation on love, loss and the inextricable link between the two. It's a valentine to Aronofsky's girlfriend and luminous leading lady, Rachel Weisz. It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck.

Weisz plays two roles in the film, Queen Isabella of Spain and Izzie, a contemporary woman who's going through an intense life passage; Hugh Jackman plays Izzie's husband, a driven physician; his 15th-century alter ego is one of Isabella's explorers. "The Fountain" travels through present, past and a temporal state represented by a snow globe.

Aronofsky, of course, is responsible for two of the most accomplished films of the past 10 years, "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream." (See In Focus on Page 33.) They exemplified both wild imagination and superb control; "The Fountain" suffers from a surfeit of the former and too little of the latter. Still, if this latest outing doesn't burnish Aronofsky's reputation as a cinematic visionary, it doesn't necessarily damage it, either; every good director is entitled to at least one ambitious failure. Next!

-- Ann Hornaday

Contains some intense sequences of violent action, some sensuality and profanity.