DARREN ARONOFSKY (1969)

MAINSTREAM REBEL

Writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s career has been uncompromising in its vision, and has seen him progress from the periphery of independent cinema to the heart of mainstream blockbuster filmmaking.

No one watches an Aronofsky film for an easy time. The filmmaker exists within a small band of directors who have made a film budgeted at over $100 million dollars without sacrificing their vision. And that vision is often dark, tortured and edging towards the apocalyptic.

A student of the American Film Institute, where his graduate film Supermarket Sweep (1991) was universally acclaimed, Aronofsky won the Best Director award at the Sundance Film Festival for his feature debut, Pi (1998). Drawing on mathematical theories, Kabbalah, the Torah and the Koran, and driven by kinetic camerawork and Clint Mansell’s mesmerising score, Pi is in equal parts riveting and disturbing. The filmmaker went further with his nightmarish follow-up, Requiem for a Dream (2000). Adapting Hubert Selby Jr.’s tale of narcotic and opiate addiction, Aronofsky interweaves his four characters’ stories into a bleak tapestry of lives destroyed by drugs. Mansell’s ‘Lux Aeterna’, with its stabbing strings, makes for a breathtaking accompaniment, but, brilliant as it is, the film is one that only those with the most hardened disposition can watch repeatedly.

If a cult film is defined as a work that teeters on the precipice of the ridiculous, leaving most audiences baffled, bemused or enraged, Aronofsky hit the bullseye with The Fountain (2006). A triptych of tales featuring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, told in the past, present and future, it appears stranger now than it did on its initial release. Its premise, regarding the search for the tree of life, told through the prism of interconnected love stories, is merely a platform for a series of extraordinary set pieces that might make no sense, but look magnificent. And yet, Aronofsky’s ongoing fascination with obsessive characters shines through.

That film failed spectacularly at the box office, and Aronofsky’s subsequent films, The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan (2010), and even Noah (2014), suggested that the filmmaker had curbed his wilder excesses. But then he delivered his strangest film yet with Mother! (2017). It can be viewed as an allegory of a despoiled Eden, a warning of the imminent danger we are wreaking upon the environment. Love it or loathe it, the film cements Aronofsky’s status as the preeminent cult US filmmaker of the 21st century.