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| Russell Crowe is all wet in Noah. |
Confronted with a un-ironic
movie about Noah's Ark, it's tempting to be cast back into the role of a
skeptical twelve year-old, forced to discuss Bible stories in Sunday school.
The "discussions" usually didn't get far, because adolescent
questions kept getting in the way ("Didn't anybody else before the Flood
ever build a boat…any boat?";
"Why did God choose a worldwide flood to punish humanity? Why not a nice
plague that killed all the people, but spared innocent plants and
animals?"; "How can an omnipotent, omniscient deity ever get 'mad'?
Did He make a mistake in creating a world full of humans with free will? And if
He made a mistake, doesn't that mean He's fallible?"; etc. etc. etc.).
The
kindly response, of course, was that we should not read the story of the Flood as
literal truth, but as a moral fable. But children's fables don't make promising
material for serious movies—and director Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, Black Swan,
Requiem for the Dream) is nothing if
not serious. Thus we reach the paradox besetting Aronofky's Noah: the preposterous premise undercuts
the tone, and the tone seems desperate to fly away from the premise.
Aronofsky
starts off by trying to defamiliarize the old story. Instead of bearded
patriarchs dwelling in Israel in ye Olde Testament vestaments, he gives us something
like The Road set outside of Reykjavik. (That's literally true—the film was shot in Iceland).
Noah (Russell Crowe), wife Naameh (Jennifer Connolly) and family live on the
run in a post-industrial hell-scape, pursued by the cannibalistic descendants of
Cain. God doesn't speak to Noah directly—he sends him dreams, which Noah
shamanistically interprets. Come time to build the Ark, he turns for help to
"The Watchers", a Tolkeinesque race of a fallen angels clad in husks
of volcanic rock.
If this
seems to you very far from the illustrations in your family Bible, you're not alone.
The most vociferous opposition to Noah
hasn't come from movie critics, but from Biblical literalists who don't
remember the story mentioning stone demons and rocket-propelled grenades. (Fact
check: Genesis 6 does say "There
were giants in the earth in those days…")
More to
the point, this Noah is an environmentalist, enjoining his children to take
from the earth "only what you need". The word "God" is
barely uttered in the script by Aronofsky and Ari Handel; instead, they use the
gender-neutral term "Creator". In short, the film wants to be
spiritual, but not religious. Attuned as they are to "dog whistle"
messages from right-wing politicians, fundamentalist Christians need only about
three seconds to tell this Noah isn't
meant for them.
So whom
is it for? It isn't for animal lovers, because aside from a few CGI sequences, caring
for all the creatures of the earth barely figure in the story. Instead,
Aronofsky and Handel want to conjure dramatic tension that isn't in the Bible.
Noah, you see, is a dead-ender, looking forward to a world without any people
in it at all. His adoptive daughter Ila (Emma Watson) isn't with that program,
daring to conceive with Noah's son Shem (Douglas Booth). Will Noah get over his
dream-destiny and let Hermione breed? Two hours in, it's hard to care much, because
all other infants on earth—billions of them, presumably—have already met watery
graves.
Truth
be told, this is an environmentalist's Noah,
and there is a hard core of people within that movement who would not shed a
tear if billions of humans on earth disappeared. It's a kind of misanthropy
that does deserve examination, at the movies and elsewhere. But this, a fable
that hardly withstands the adolescent laugh test, hardly seems the place.
© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro
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