by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Darren Aronofsky’s 2014 version of Noah, an elaborate riff on the Biblical story of Noah and
the Flood — and one of the most grandly disappointing films I’ve seen in my
life. It’s the sort of thing Dwight Macdonald called “the bad good movie,” a
film you desperately want to like
because its aspirations are so grand and because Aronofsky (who not only
directed but co-wrote the screenplay with Ari Handel, and according to imdb.com
has been fascinated by the Noah story since the seventh grade, when he wrote an
essay called “The Dove” for a seventh-grade teacher, Vera Fried, who has two
cameo roles in the film) was clearly attempting to use the Biblical story to
make a statement for our own time and not going either for a reverential
treatment or a DeMille-style plumbing of the Bible as an excuse to show
spectacular sinning and even more spectacular retribution. The problem — well,
there are a lot of problems with Noah, but the main one is it’s boring; instead of making
a Biblical film that’s reverentially dull, he made one that’s anti‑reverentially dull. Aronofsky decided that the
antagonism between God and the entire human race wasn’t dramatic enough to get
an entire movie out of it, so he took characters who were barely mentioned in
the Bible — including a race of giants whom Aronofsky renamed “The Watchers”
and who looked like stone versions of the Transformers robots; and Tubal-Cain, a descendant of the original
Cain who gets all of two sentences in the Bible but whom Aronofsky and Handel
inflated into the principal villain and the second male lead. The one good
thing about Noah is the visual
splendor — though Aronofsky and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, kept
their movie rooted in the modern-day past-is-brown convention (indeed, the
modern-day everything-is-brown
convention!), within that stricture they created some absolutely stunning shots
that are beautiful to look at but don’t take your mind off the fact that almost
nothing interesting is happening
in them. Noah is played by Russell Crowe, who’s a powerful screen presence and
at least superficially right for the part, and Tubal-Cain is Ray Winstone, who
was obviously selected because his best-known previous credit is playing
Beowulf and therefore audiences expect to see him in swords-and-sandals stories. The conceit is that all the
humans in the film except Noah
and his family are descendants of Cain, while Noah and his relatives (in both
directions — his grandfather Methuselah, played by Anthony Hopkins, is a major
presence in the film, used something like Leonard Nimoy as the old Spock in the
last two Star Trek movies) are
the only surviving descendants of Cain’s other brother Seth — which at least provides a convenient
explanation of why God is willing to destroy the rest of humanity but let Noah,
his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and their three sons Shem (Douglas Booth,
easily the cutest guy in the film), Ham (Logan Lerman in an all-too-modern
hairdo) and Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll) live through the Flood.
The film is not helped by the forced parallels Aronofsky and Handel
put in to modern-day values; not only are Noah and his family vegetarians
(which we’re clearly intended to believe makes them morally superior to the
meat-eating Canaanites) but Noah’s whole reading of God’s intentions for the
Flood turns him into the world’s first deep ecologist. He becomes so
monomaniacally convinced that the purpose of the Flood is for God to eliminate
his error in creating humans that he’s excruciatingly unpleasant to watch
throughout the second half of the film. First he lets his son Ham’s girlfriend
die (Japheth was an adult in the Bible but is still pre-pubescent here) and
then he accepts that Shem’s girlfriend Ila (Emma Watson) is barren, so Noah
assumes that he and his sons are supposed to be the last male humans and they
are only being kept alive so they can get all the animals off the Ark and
re-establish the rest of Creation before they all croak and take the human race
with them. Noah becomes so
obsessed with the idea that his mission from God is to let humanity die that
when Ila turns out not to be barren after all — she ultimately gets pregnant
with twin daughters (which isn’t going to be much help repopulating the planet
with humans — when it’s revealed that she’s bearing twins I assumed they’d at
least be fraternal, one boy and one girl, and they’d grow up à la Siegmund and Sieglinde) — he takes a dagger to his
newborn grandkids and Aronofsky, in virtually his only truly suspenseful bit of
direction in the whole movie, leaves us wondering whether he’s going to go
Medea or Norma on us — whether he’s actually going to knock off the babies or
he’s going to have an attack of conscience and spare them — before he finally
spares them and the movie creaks to its long-overdue (it’s 138 minutes and
probably could have been at least half an hour shorter — in fact the whole
thing is so slowly paced Aronofsky could probably have made it half an hour
shorter without cutting a word of his script simply by pacing it faster!) end. It does help that for once the Ark is depicted as a barge
instead of a boat, and it looks at least close to big enough to contain two of
every species of animal in the world, but what doesn’t help is how “fake” the animals look. No animals were
harmed during the making of Noah
because no real animals were used; all the images of things creeping, crawling, slithering or just minding
their own business were computer-generated and, as Aronofsky admitted,
“slightly tweaked” so they don’t quite look like their real-life prototypes. What’s more, there’s
surprisingly little of the spectacle we’d expect from a film about Noah and the
Ark: there aren’t spectacular battle scenes with Tubal-Cain and his men; there
aren’t great special effects scenes showing the Flood itself and the
destruction of the earth (one would have expected Biblical equivalents of the
modern-dress apocalypse George Pal so unforgettably realized back in 1953 in When
Worlds Collide), nor is there the shot we
want of the floodwaters receding and leaving the ark on top of Mount Ararat,
with the animals pouring out of it to re-take their places in Creation. (In
this version, once we see the Ark again after the flood, it’s broken into two
pieces like the Titanic in real
life and in James Cameron’s film.)
The releasing studio, Paramount, freaked out
when Aronofsky turned in his director’s cut of Noah and prepared at least three alternate versions,
including one that ran just 88 minutes and sought to cut out all Aronofsky’s
and Handel’s additions to the basic Biblical story. Aronofsky, predictably, was
not amused; “No one has ever done that to me,” he told an interviewer. “I
imagine if I made comedies and horror films, it would be helpful. In dramas,
it’s very, very hard to do. I’ve never been open to it. I don’t believe that.”
Apparently Paramount was hoping for an “inspirational” movie that would sell to
what’s become known as the “faith” audience — the born-again Christians who’ve
made things like The Passion of the Christ and more recent God-centered films hits — until they gave up and
released the film in Aronofsky’s cut, to predictably disappointing box-office
results. Indeed, the biggest mystery about Noah is who Paramount’s executives thought the audience
for it would be — it’s so far off the Biblical story, both in terms of the
added (or inflated) characters (those damned rock giants may explain how the
Ark got built — at least we weren’t expected to believe Noah and his three kids
did it all themselves — but they’re too ugly to be either moving or scary and
one wonders what they’re doing there dramaturgically; they’re supposed to be
fallen angels who are condemned to rockhood by God for trying to help Adam way
back when, but despite the beautiful scene in which they’re “killed” by
Tubal-Cain’s men, thereby liberating their inner angels and allowing them to
fly back to Heaven, one still
wonders why on earth they’re there) and in Aronofsky’s bloated deep-ecological
“take” on it, there was no way
Bible-believing Christians or Jews were going to flock to this film, while the
secular audience has little or no interest in the Bible as a source for a film.
Though I haven’t seen Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ since it was new, I recall that as an excellent
movie that succeeded where Noah
failed in “tweaking” a Biblical story so it had a new meaning for the modern
era and reworking a myth for greater dramatic interest and power.
