Me, I'm exhausted after sweeping autumn leaves off the porch. But director Darren Aronofsky gives new meaning to sweeping. His time-trip triptych called "The Fountain" tackles love, life, death and immortality -- just about all the Eternal Verities -- over a span of 10 centuries.

	Darren Aronofsky out-Kubricks Kubrick with a triple tale starring Hugh Jackman. Click photo for larger image. 'The Fountain' Director: Darren Aronofsky. Starring: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn. Rating: PG-13 for some intense sequences of violent action, sensuality and language. Family Film Guide Web site: http://thefountainmovie.warnerbros.com/

You'll go a long way to find a more ambitious undertaking, and an even longer way to fully grasp it. Stanley Kubrick's odyssey was a quick cigarette run to the Get-Go compared to Aronofsky's.

The astro-protagonist of three parallel stories is Hugh Jackman. In the present tense, he's doctor-scientist Tom, frantically working on an experimental cancer treatment for his beloved wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz). She seems tranquilly resigned to her fate, but he is decidedly not.

Death is merely a disease to be cured, in Tom's opinion. Racing impatiently against time, he can't understand her obsession with the 16th-century Spanish exploration story she has been writing -- "The Fountain" -- whose conquistador hero Tomas (also Jackman) is charged by Queen Isabel (also Weisz) to find the fabled source of eternal youth in America.

Izzi begs Tom to finish the book for her, which he will do -- in the 26th century. Talk about leisurely deadlines. That third futuristic leg of this epic is where Tom morphs into a time traveler-unraveler of universal regeneration in the distant nebula Xibalba.

Pack lightly for the journey: Getting there through the three interwoven tales is less a matter of comprehending than surviving Aronofsky's extravagant bombardment of eye-popping images, flashily created by production designer James Chinlund and executed by cinematographer Matthew Libatique in golden candlelit chiaroscuro. Tom Creo (which means "I believe" in Spanish) has a nifty snow-globe spaceship.

Hugh Jackman plays Tommy Creo and Rachel Weisz plays his ailing wife, Izzi Creo, in "The Fountain." Click photo for larger image.

Wolverine Man Jackman works nobly in the three parts of his trinity -- kind of a father, son and ghostly holy future man. Weisz (Oscar winner for "The Constant Gardener") is poignant as Izzi and even better as creepy, queenly Isabel. Ellen Burstyn -- the film's only other significant character -- is fine as Tom's scientific mentor (she's an Aronofsky veteran from "Requiem for a Dream").

The problem is the writer-director's anthro-historical grandiosity -- and liberties. His sci-fi mythology, for example, substitutes the Yucatan Mayas for the Florida swamps of Ponce de Leon's actual Fountain of Youth search. Overall, this psychedelic pre-and-post-diluvian fable is laced with more cutting-edge mumbo-jumbo than an audience can realistically be asked to digest, let alone believe.

What if you could really live forever? What if the immortal source of life is a Tree instead of a Fountain? What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?

Turns out, a tree grows in Xibalba as well as Brooklyn, and that death is not just a metaphysical transition but an act of creation. Which is not exactly an original conclusion. It can be arrived at through various religions and degrees of pomposity, puffery or simplicity.

All roads -- including "The Fountain's" -- lead to or from Kubrick's "2001," and the beautiful nonsense of this film leads us back to Mark Twain: "It is better to be a young junebug than an old bird-of-paradise."

In the end, the Age of Anxiety -- be it 16th, 21st or 26th century -- seems really to be just the anxiety of age.