Director's Cut: The Fountainhead

 

The Fountainhead - Director's Cut

Genre: Drama

Director: Zack Snyder

Writer: Dwight Gallo

Based on the novel by Ayn Rand

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Brie Larson, Zachary Quinto, Mark Strong, Michael Stuhlbarg

Plot: Howard Roark (Ryan Gosling) is fired from a prestigious architecture firm after refusing to revise a series of radical designs considered too expensive, impractical, and hostile to public taste. His employers praise his talent even as they show him the door. Roark has already become notorious in architectural and high-society circles, where his uncompromising buildings are treated as equal parts curiosity and joke. Ellsworth Toohey (Michael Stuhlbarg), the influential architecture critic for The Banner, recognizes an easy target. His columns ridicule Roark’s work as arrogant and antisocial while praising architects who borrow safely from the past. Gail Wynand (Mark Strong), the newspaper’s wealthy and ruthless publisher, barely notices the campaign beyond the fact that Toohey’s columns sell papers.

Dominique Francon (Brie Larson), a sharp-tongued columnist for The Banner, sees through Toohey immediately. At parties she listens as wealthy patrons laugh over reproductions of Roark’s designs before turning around to praise the conventional work of her fiancé, Peter Keating (Zachary Quinto). Keating knows how to flatter clients, recycle fashionable styles, and tell every room exactly what it wants to hear. Dominique says little, but later uses her column to praise the very qualities in Roark that everyone else finds offensive. She becomes fascinated by an architect she has never met and increasingly disgusted by a world in which Keating prospers while Roark cannot find work.

Roark moves from firm to firm and rejection to rejection. Clients admire his drawings until they ask him to add columns, ornamental facades, or historical details that serve no structural purpose. Each time, Roark simply rolls up his plans and leaves. Eventually he runs out of money and takes work at a stone quarry owned by Dominique’s father. Stripped of drafting tables and drawing rooms, he spends his days drilling into rock beneath the summer sun. While staying at her family estate, Dominique rides past the quarry and notices him below. Roark stops working long enough to meet her stare. Neither looks away.

Dominique arranges to have Roark sent to her bedroom to repair a damaged white marble fireplace. Roark quickly realizes there is nothing wrong with it that requires him personally and mocks the elaborate excuse. When another laborer arrives the following day to finish the work, Dominique rides furiously back to the quarry. She finds Roark walking alone and lashes him across the face with her riding crop. Roark catches her wrist before she can strike again. That night he appears at her open bedroom window. Their attraction finally erupts in a fierce encounter born as much from anger and competition as desire, leaving neither willing to admit what has passed between them.

The following morning, Roark receives a letter offering him an architectural commission and leaves the quarry immediately. Dominique returns several days later and finds his place empty. When offered the chance to learn where he went, she refuses. She keeps the broken piece of marble he left behind without knowing that the quarry worker she cannot forget is Howard Roark, the architect whose work she has been defending in print.

Months later, the Enright House rises above the city, a severe modern structure of steel, stone, and glass surrounded by buildings covered in decorative excess. Toohey attacks it relentlessly, turning its opening into a fashionable spectacle for people eager to mock it. Dominique arrives and sees Roark across the room. Recognition stops her cold. Later, she goes to his apartment and asks him to abandon architecture before the world destroys him. She offers herself and a life together in exchange. Roark refuses. If she wants him, she must want the man who builds exactly what he believes should exist. Dominique leaves knowing she loves him and equally convinced that she will eventually watch society ruin him.

Gail Wynand becomes fascinated with Dominique after recognizing that her contempt for the circles she inhabits nearly equals his own. He proposes marriage even after she tells him she does not love him. Dominique accepts, choosing the most powerful man in the world she despises as another way of surrendering to it. Wynand later commissions Roark to design an isolated country home for them. During months of work, the two men form an unexpected friendship. Wynand, who has spent his life buying influence and controlling other people, becomes fascinated by someone who seems entirely beyond purchase. Dominique watches Roark and her husband grow closer and finds herself unable to decide which man she fears losing more.

Peter Keating’s celebrated career eventually outruns his talent when he is awarded a massive public housing development. Alone with the plans, he realizes he cannot design it. He goes secretly to Roark and begs for help. Roark agrees to create the entire project without credit on one condition: nothing he designs can be changed. Keating eagerly accepts. Roark produces a stark, economical complex built around light, space, and function. Once construction begins, however, committees demand balconies, ornamentation, additional wings, and decorative features. Toohey quietly encourages every revision while Keating repeatedly assures himself that each compromise is minor.

Roark visits the construction site and sees his design buried beneath alterations. He walks through the unfinished complex without speaking, studying walls moved from their original positions and meaningless decoration bolted onto structural concrete. That night Dominique arrives at the deserted site and finds Roark preparing explosives. She understands immediately. Rather than stopping him, she helps clear the area and ensures no one will be inside. From a distant ridge she watches the charges erupt in sequence, the corrupted buildings collapsing beneath columns of fire and concrete dust. Roark remains at the site and makes no attempt to flee when the authorities arrive.

Toohey sees the arrest as his chance to destroy Roark permanently. He corners Keating and forces him to admit that Roark secretly designed the project, leaving Keating exposed as a fraud while providing the evidence needed for prosecution. Newspapers across the city portray Roark as a madman who destroyed homes intended for the poor. Wynand initially allows The Banner to join them, until his friendship with Roark finally forces him to confront what his newspaper has become. He abruptly orders the paper to defend Roark.

Toohey responds by turning Wynand’s own empire against him. Writers resign. Printers refuse to work. Advertisers disappear. Newsstands return unsold copies of The Banner while crowds gather outside its offices. Wynand walks through a nearly deserted newsroom surrounded by silent presses and finally discovers the limits of the power he thought he owned. Facing the destruction of everything he spent his life building, he capitulates. Toohey’s faction returns, and the next edition of The Banner condemns Howard Roark.

At trial, Roark calls no witnesses. Photographs of the original housing design and the altered project stand side by side before the jury. Roark speaks about the men who created buildings, machines, art, and ideas before anyone else knew they were possible, arguing that creation begins with an individual mind and cannot survive when that mind is forced to surrender ownership of its work. He does not ask for sympathy and does not apologize for the demolition. When the verdict comes back not guilty, Roark simply gathers his papers and walks out through the stunned courtroom.

Wynand summons Roark to the empty offices of The Banner. He offers him one final commission: the Wynand Building, the tallest and greatest structure the publisher has ever attempted. There will be no committee, no revisions, and no restrictions. Roark may build whatever he wants. He accepts. The two men shake hands without discussing what happened between them. After Roark leaves, Wynand walks through the abandoned newsroom, switches off the lights one row at a time, returns to his office, and kills himself.

Months later, the Wynand Building rises above the city. Dominique arrives at the construction site and gives her name as Mrs. Roark. She steps into an exposed construction elevator and begins the long ascent through the steel skeleton of the skyscraper. The streets shrink beneath her while wind tears through the unfinished structure. Looking upward, she finally sees Roark standing alone at the highest completed level, silhouetted against an enormous white sky. The elevator continues climbing until the city disappears beneath him and nothing remains in Dominique’s view but Roark, steel, and the building he created.