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Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton), a widower, and his son, Sonny (Heath Ledger), are corrections officers in the local prison. They reside in Louisiana with Hank's ailing father, Buck (Peter Boyle), an unwavering racist whose wife committed suicide. Hank's hateful attitude toward others, strongly influenced by his father, extends to his son, and members of the neighboring community.
As Hank and Sonny assist in the execution of convicted murderer Lawrence Musgrove (Sean Combs), the proceedings prove too intense for Sonny, who collapses and then begins to vomit as he is leading Lawrence to the electric chair. Hank beats up Sonny in the jail's bathroom afterwards for being so "soft". Some time later, Hank drags Sonny out of bed and tells him to get out of the house. Unable to cope with the estrangement, Sonny grabs a gun. The confrontation ends in their living room with Hank at gunpoint, lying on the carpet, and Sonny in Buck's customary chair. Sonny asks his father, "You hate me, don't you?" After his father calmly confirms that he does and always has, Sonny responds, "Well, I always loved you," and then shoots himself in the heart. Hank subsequently buries Sonny in the back garden, quits his job at the prison, burns his uniform in the backyard, and locks the door of Sonny's room up tightly. Buck calls him a quitter.
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The film is an adaptation of Childers' memoir Another Man's War. Although the film centers on Childers, it starts off with a scene in South Sudan, where the LRA are attacking a village. This opening scene is placed into context later in the film. Childers was an alcoholic drug-using biker from Pennsylvania. On his release from prison, he finds that his wife has given up her job as a stripper, because she has since become a Christian. Eventually, after almost killing a vagrant the night before, his wife persuades him to go to church with her where he is eventually converted.
Later, on a missionary trip to Uganda to build homes for refugees, he asks one of the SPLA soldiers watching over them to take him on a trip to the north, to Sudan. The soldier warns him that it is a war zone, but upon Sam's insistence they go. They arrive at a medical tent in Sudan, as his friend moves off to talk came in to some people, Sam is roped in by a redheaded female doctor to help lift a lipless Sudanese woman onto the examination table. That night as they lay on their beds at the relief station, they hear noises outside, when they look out Sam and the soldier see large numbers of Sudanese children swarming in to sleep outside the building. The soldier explains that their parents send them to sleep over there because it is safer than staying in their own village. Sam wakes up the children and gets them to sleep in their room for the night. The next day they follow the children back to their village only to find that the LRA burnt it down and killed their parents. Then one of the children runs after his dog and dies upon stepping on a hidden landmine. Sam then decides to build an orphanage for the children of South Sudan. After the orphanage is built, the LRA attack it under cover of night and burn it to the ground. Sam then phones home, telling his wife what happened and that he is giving up. She reminds him that the orphans have been through worse but they have not given up, and that he should not give up and tells him to rebuild the orphanage.
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Poongsan, whose real name is never revealed, is a mysterious messenger who crosses the demarcation line between the two Koreas, delivering letters and cherished heirlooms between separated families in Seoul and Pyongyang.
One day he is commissioned by South Korean government agents with the task of smuggling in In-ok, the beautiful lover of a high-ranking North Korean defector, into the South. Yet things take an unexpected turn when the deliveryman falls for the young woman, but their romance is put in jeopardy by the obstacles they encounter.
Part love story, part postwar tragedy, with a dose of comedy thrown in, the low-budget film Poongsan depicts the sad reality of the division between the two Koreas.
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At its core, The Fountain is the story of a 21st century man, Tom, (Hugh Jackman), losing his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) to cancer in 2005. As she is dying, Izzi begs Tommy to share what time they have left together, but he is focused on his quest to find a cure for her.
While he's working in the lab, she writes a story about 16th century Queen Isabella losing her territory to the Inquisition while her betrothed, conquistador Tomás, plunges through the Central America forest in Mayan territory, searching for the Tree of Life for his Queen.
Since she doesn't have time herself, Izzi asks Tommy to finish the story for her. As they look out to the stars, she imagines that their souls will meet there when the star dies. And we see astronaut Tom, in 2500, traveling there for the event, in a spaceship made of an enclosed biosphere containing the Tree of Life.
The three story lines are told nonlinearly, each separated by five centuries. The three periods are interwoven with match cuts and recurring visual motifs; Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play the main characters for all three narratives. Even within a given narrative, the elements of that particular story are not told in chronological order.
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The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job.
Afterwards, a mysterious, wavering light that resembles a flame flickers in the darkness. Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) recalls a lesson taught to her that people must choose to either follow the path of grace or the path of nature. In the early 1970s, she receives a telegram informing her of the death of her son, R.L., at age nineteen. Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt) is notified by telephone while at an airport. The family is thrown into turmoil.
In the 2000s, eldest son Jack O'Brien (Sean Penn) is adrift in his modern life as an architect. One day he has an argument with his father regarding R.L.'s death. Later, after Jack sees a tree being planted in front of a building, he begins to reminisce about his life as a young teenager during the 1960s.
The universe is formed, including the Milky Way galaxy and the Solar System. Voices ask various existential questions. On the newly formed Earth, volcanoes erupt and microbes begin to form. Early sea life is shown, then plants on land, then dinosaurs. From the vantage point of space, an asteroid is seen impacting the Earth. (For these sequences, the music is "Lacrimosa," a movement from Zbigniew Preisner's Requiem for My Friend [1988].)
