In which the Bible gets weird.
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writers: Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth
Runtime: 138 mins.
2014
Noah could have gone one of two ways.
It could have catered to its Christian audience, presenting a souped up but conservative Noah narrative that would please the religious crowd and hopefully nab the sad group of Russell Crowe fans that remain loyal. In other words, it could have gone the way of God Is Not Dead, a fundamentalist narrative about the triumphs of faith that was released around the same time as Noah, and is of course laughably inept from a filmmaking perspective. But it makes the Christian audience happy. I don't mean to pick on Christian movies, fundamentalism in general makes for bad filmmaking: we need only look at the recently released conclusion to the Atlas Shrugged trilogy, which is apparently one of the most embarrassing excuses for a movie trilogy to ever be ejaculated onto the populace.
Alternately, Noah could have abandoned the Christian (and Jewish, though I can't imagine they would mind nearly as much) audience by taking loads of silly liberal liberties with the Noah narrative, in an attempt to appeal to the sort of folks who get excited about a Hercules movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Fundamentalist Christians would have become this film's enemy, going on crusades about how the Hollywood machine has tainted Truth yet again. Most others would have ignored it as a version of Evan Almighty that didn't pretend to be funny.
I let Noah slip under my radar because I wasn't interested in watching either of those possibilities. I made a mistake. It turns out Noah is a PG-13 action movie that doesn't fall into either of the above categories. It falls into a category of its own. It is like nothing you've ever seen before.
A lot of people called it bad. Everybody called it weird. I call it confusing, exciting, beautiful, and tremendously uneven. I don't understand what it all means, but I have a review to write, so I'm going to pretend.
How the hell did he get saddled with a blockbuster property like this?
Turns out Noah is Aronofsky's pet project, one he has been incubating for fifteen years. The well-deserved critical acclaim of Black Swan gave him the leverage to finally make it happen.
Boy did he make something happen. The opening scene of Noah is a clumsy, erratic, stylish exposition dump. In the beginning there was darkness, the Creator made the world, the Creator made man, man ate the apple, Cain killed Abel, blah blah blah Genesis stuff. Noah descended from Seth, so he lives in peaceful harmony with the land, whereas the descendants of Cain have ravaged the earth with industry. They spread over the face of the planet with the unwitting help of a bunch of fallen angels who look like walking clusters of boulders.
You know how the story goes. Noah (Russell Crowe) is called to build an ark so that all life will not be extinguished when God floods the world. Noah sets about this task with the help of his family and the aforementioned stone angels. Of course, the seed of Cain don't like the idea of drowning. Led by the charismatic Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), these men prepare for the rains by preparing for war. They will take the ark for themselves.
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Sounds typical, right? A black and white good/evil set up that will predictably lead to a smashy-smashy CGI finale? Noah will protect the ark and his faith will be rewarded? Not so!
Aronofsky crafts a more complex world than we could or should ever expect to see in a PG-13 Bible epic. It plays like Torah meets Tolkein, morose dirt-caked landscapes and solemn realism blended with stunning colorscapes and fantasy elements. The visual tone is inconsistent, sometimes purposefully so, but it is anything but cookie-cutter.
The characters don't fare so well. The dialogue is perhaps the most lacking element of Noah--it oscillates from flat and hammy to surprisingly poignant. Noah's children: Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham (Logan Lerman), and Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll), are for the most part doorstops. Japheth has like two lines. None of them have any arks to speak of, with the slight exception of Ham. His character starts to get interesting toward the last half hour. Too little too late.
Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) suffers from the fatal combination of flat characterization and poop performance choices. She mostly recedes into the background, but when her moments to dominate the scene arrive, she just makes you want her to be quiet.
Ila (Emma Watson), Noah's adopted daughter, is the second best of the family unit. Some of the best scenes in the movie pair her and Noah, although her love interest Shem drags her down a bit. When will these Hollywood screenwriters stop writing male characters who are nothing but sexual accessories for the female characters who occupy the limelight? (That's actually what Shem is, which is kind of great.)
Anthony Hopkins gets to be Methuselah, and I couldn't decide whether his performance was subtle or boring. Either way, he doesn't distract.
Noah is clearly at the center of this movie. The struggle of a man who is willing to let humanity die... wait, let me talk about something else first.
Noah's visions from the Creator are eye-popping montages. These sequences are what first drew me into the movie, a movie which I was wholly prepared to dismiss even after the first fifteen or so minutes. The hallucinations are visceral, bolstered by top notch sound editing. They are not subtle, but they are fine. One particular sequence, well-placed at about three quarters of the way through the movie, portrays the creation of the universe in a way that I have never seen before. We are taken through the Genesis story in a progression that combines stop motion and time lapse to create something new entirely. This method allows us to witness the entire elegant evolution of the human race, including a callback to the murder of Abel that combines dozens of warriors from dozens of historical eras into one single primal tableau... you just have to see it. (If you honestly don't ever plan on seeing the movie, watch it here. Otherwise, just wait you dingus.) These gonzo visual dalliances are more unique than anything we're used to seeing in PG-13 action movies. They are worth the price of admission alone.
But they are only the second best thing about Noah. (Maybe the third best, depending on how much you love the shrieking bombastic score by Clint Mansell, composer of my favorite motion picture soundtrack: Moon. He also composed what is perhaps the most famous piece of movie music outside of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
No, the best thing about Noah is the way it straddles moral ambiguity without blinking an eye. I know I keep saying this, but it's as if Noah forgets that it is a PG-13 Hollywood action movie for long stretches of time... and when it remembers, it's too big and dumb to be mistaken for anything else. This is where we get tangled up in the weirdness of the whole thing.
See, for a while Noah seems like the wise, faultless, God-fearing patriarch that we expect him to be. But something slowly dawns on Noah: over the course of the building of the ark, Noah comes to believe that humanity is inherently corrupt, and that God has tasked him with the responsibility of wiping humans from the earth. See, Ila is barren, so no children there. And when Noah goes off to fetch wives for his other sons among the rabble of the descendants of Cain, he can't bear to do it. The depravity is too great. He believes that God means for mankind to end with his youngest son, Japheth. The world belongs to the animals now.
It is with this conclusion in mind that Noah begins to make some... questionable decisions. He carries out his duties with the gravity of a tortured soul. See, after the waters come and the battle is won, the movie is not over. We continue to follow Noah, trapped in the vessel of his own construction, listening to the cries of countless lives being extinguished in the deluge. It's heavy. And when the possibility that the human race might continue presents itself, Noah is prepared to take drastic, inhumane measures to make sure that doesn't happen. Russell Crowe sells all of this with aplomb, in an understated performance that is too powerful to get lost in Aronofsky's bombast. The last time Crowe was nearly this good would probably be 3:10 to Yuma.
Noah's character ark takes him from tortured hero (who incidentally has no qualms over killing his enemies, which makes him little different than the descendants of Cain) to just plain tortured, haunting the creaking ark like a wraith, condemned to his fate as a servant of the Creator. We begin to question, well, everything, including the notion that Tubal-cain was a clear-cut antagonist.
Part of that is a subtle performance by Ray Winstone. He doesn't spout silly rhetoric like a supervillain. When he asks the Creator why He will not speak to mankind anymore, we believe him. When he gives speeches to his people about man's right to determine his own fate, we believe him. When he tries to corrupt members of Noah's family, we believe him--and his twisted perspective is often more apparently correct than Noah's.
Is his perspective that twisted, though? His ideals aren't that far off from those of secular humanism. There are hints of Enlightenment philosophy in his speeches. He is set up as a malicious figure, but as Noah turns more toward sullen menace, so Tubal-cain starts to seem more reasonable.
Yet Noah somehow manages to juggle these balls of morality without explicitly disrespecting the religious text from which it springs. Nothing in the Torah deliberately contradicts any of the fancies of Noah. This film could be interpreted as a narrative of the hardships and triumphs of faith, or as a narrative of the injustices and dangers of fundamentalism. It's all there!
Maybe that's why so many audience members dismissed Noah as nonsense. We're not used to movies like this, movies that challenge the audience's expectations, movies that force the protagonists to live with the consequences of their supposedly just and pious actions.
There are two climaxes, which taken together perfectly sum up the experience of Noah. The first is a bland and overplayed knife fight, awash in melodrama with only a few redeeming moments. This scene represents the dull stretches of Noah, of which there are a few.
The second is an emotional show-down on the roof of the ark, with stakes that I will not ruin now, but they are shockingly perverse. By this point in the film I was totally invested in the inner life of this man named Noah, with the deaths of thousands on his shoulders, and the fate of humanity in his hands.
Obviously humanity survives somehow. You and I are here. But the absurd achievement of Noah is to make us wonder whether or not that is a good thing.
3 / 5 BLOBS
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