Rachel Weisz names her most misunderstood movie: “A lot of people didn’t get it”
“I think that clearly it’s not a blockbuster. It’s a very, very unusual, daring, innovative piece of work,” says Rachel Weisz of one of her more divisive pieces of cinema.
The Oscar winner for her performance in the 2005 conspiracy thriller The Constant Gardener is an old reliable of Hollywood, who can be called upon to star in anything from strange prestige dramedies to MCU entries.
Weisz’s filmography includes the likes of The Favourite, Black Widow, The Lobster, Oz the Great and Powerful, The Lovely Bones, and The Mummy, with the recent massive news that she will be reuniting with Brendan Fraser for a The Mummy legacy sequel. Make no mistake, Weisz is a star who can afford to and should take some risks, for this is where her most interesting work is. She also earned another Oscar nomination for starring in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, the film that kicked off his longstanding creative partnership with Emma Stone, though Weisz moved on to other things.
I wouldn’t necessarily defend it, but I find the earlier Oz the Great and Powerful very interesting in the context of Wicked’s explosion in pop culture, as it agrees that the Wizard of Oz is a total fraud but depicts this positively, casting him in a benevolent light. Weisz plays the Wicked Witch of the East, the true manipulator who literally destroys her sister’s heart, turning her into the Wicked Witch of the West. But, as Weisz says, her greatest film is not a blockbuster (though by my estimate, Oz the Great and Powerful barely broke even).
In 2006, Weisz starred in the sci-fi romance The Fountain, directed by her then-partner Darren Aronofsky. “Seeing someone you know be good at something is really appealing,” Weisz told AV Club. “Seeing how he behaved on set, it was another aspect of him, the director. He’d never directed me at home in the kitchen before. It was just seeing a whole other aspect of someone. It was really, really exciting. I loved it.”
Also starring Hugh Jackman, The Fountain follows the two leads as three sets of characters in different times, in each case as Jackman’s character tries to find some way to save or be reunited with his doomed love. The Fountain divided critics, with many praising its thematic execution but others calling it too messy, and it flopped at the box office. In 2017, Aronofsky’s also confusingly symbolic Jennifer Lawrence film Mother! became so hated that the studio publicly defended it, following in The Fountain’s footsteps with more aggravated results.
But Weisz highlights that some people were touched by The Fountain’s exploration of mortality. “And I meet people all the time who say it moved them powerfully and meant something very special to them,” says the star. “I think the theme of coming to terms with death is very uncommercial. It’s about the most uncommercial theme possible, because movies tend to be about escape. Now we’re in a recession, and at war, so people want to see this chihuahua movie. To be told to come to terms with death, that death is the road to all—it’s a very intense subject.”
“But as with movies that are very unusual,” Weisz continues, “That have come to be thought of as very interesting, one finds out at the time that they were not understood. So who knows? We’ll see.”
The Fountain has attained its cult classic status and is worth revisiting among Aronofsky’s wildly varying works, from mother! to Caught Stealing. Weisz’s old comments also prompt us to think about exactly what we want from entertainment—escape or the truth?
