Noah (2014)

      Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is three different movies at once. It’s a kind of film everyone’s making these days – the sci-fi/fantasy adventure – wrapped around a kind of film everyone used to make – the Biblical epic – itself wrapped around a kind of film hardly anyone makes – the kind that deals with real, deadly serious questions of religion and the human condition. That these three don’t always coexist seamlessly is not really a surprise; the surprise is that they mesh as well as they do. I’ve seen Noah described as weird, epic, flawed, ambitious, fantastic, and scary. It is, in its way, all of these things. It also offers over two hours of riveting cinema.

     Noah of course has its roots in the Book of Genesis. The bare outline of the story is familiar and simple: dismayed at the wickedness of humanity in the generations after Adam and Eve, God decides to start over. A great flood will cover the earth, destroying all life. A man named Noah and his family are tasked with building an ark to contain enough of every animal to repopulate the world after the waters subside. This they do. Biblical narrative, however, is famously spare, and to fill out the story, Aronofsky and his co-screenwriter Ari Handel have dipped into a number of traditions. One is the Jewish literature of midrash – writings by rabbis which attempt to fill the frustrating gaps and bridge the puzzling inconsistencies of the scriptural text. The filmmakers have said, in fact, that they see their film as belonging in its own way to the midrashic tradition. At the same time, however, Noah also partakes deeply of cinematic tradition, absorbing the work of artists such as DeMille, Kurosawa, James Cameron, and Peter Jackson. This is not, in other words, a Bible storybook put in motion. Noah is, instead, an attempt to bring the story of God’s flood and Noah’s clan’s survival to cinematic life, with all of life’s ups and downs and tragedies and deep questions.

     So it is that we are treated to a tale of two clans: the line of Cain (the first murderer) and the line of Seth. Cain’s line, led in this generation by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone) has systematically despoiled the earth for raw materials, building a great industrial civilization at Creation’s expense. Seth’s line consists at this point of Noah (Russell Crowe), his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), and their sons Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham (Logan Lerman), and Japeth (Leo McHugh Carroll). Filling out the edges of the family are Ila (Emma Watson), an orphan rescued and raised by Noah, and Noah’s wizard-like grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins). This clan lives close to the land, gathering plants to eat and protecting what parts of creation they can. In a dream, the Creator (the movie’s only name for a ruling deity) warns Noah of the impending destruction of the world by water. Aided by narcotic tea cooked up by Methuselah, Noah has a further vision setting out the nature of the ark he must construct to survive the deluge. He is helped in this task by the Watchers, a troop of fallen angels whose punishment is to have been encased in the rock and mud of the earth they loved too much. Noah is opposed, naturally, by Tubal-cain and his followers, who rather understandably fail to see the fairness is the Creator’s sparing of only one human family. Adding tension are some intra-family squabbles in the Noah clan. Shem and Ila seem made for each other – but what of the other two sons? Are they to have families after the flood? As Noah comes to increasingly despair of the wickedness of the Cain tribe, the answer seems more and more negative. By the time the family enters the ark, in fact, Noah is actively planning the end of his own line, telling his youngest son he will be “the last man.” However, other forces are at play, including a vengeful, stowaway Tubal-cain and the magic operations of Methuselah.

     At this point it may sound like there is, as critic Joe Bob Briggs used to say, too much plot getting in the way of the story. In fact, these many plotlines all serve as variations on a theme, a series of concentric circles around the idea of justice. Should the Watchers be punished for giving divine knowledge to humankind? Should the descendants of Cain really pay for their wicked use of Creation with their lives? And if something in human nature is to blame, why should anyone – even the less wasteful Noah – escape? Why does the Creator “speak” in visions to Noah, but to no other men? Is Noah being used as an instrument of wrath, or of mercy? The film tracks Noah as he becomes increasingly angry at his own kind, and his desire to save creation gives way to a related desire to eradicate the humans he sees as creation’s enemy. Against Noah’s principled zealotry, the movie pits Tubal-cain’s humanist pragmatism (he sees the Creator’s gift to humanity as dominion over Creation, and fails to understand why humans made in a god’s image should not behave in godlike ways) and Naameh’s earthy optimism (it is she who pushes for wives for all the sons, and believes in life itself as good). Caught in the middle are Noah’s children, who must decide when to follow their father, and when to go their own ways.

     There is a lot of substance to Aronofsky and Handel’s script, but in the end it’s deeper than it is smart. Some of the dialogue is a bit tin-eared, and many narrative beats will be predictable to those with some knowledge of cinematic rather than Biblical lore. Like the Creator Noah follows, Noah speaks more powerfully in images than in words. Aronofsky has always been a very visually-oriented director, and much of what makes Noah compelling is in what is literally up there on the screen. A mythic tale like that of Noah and his clan, set in a nebulous scriptural prehistory, gives the director full license to embrace a sort of magical realism, in which fountains and forests sprout from a single seed, hordes of animals march freely into the ark and curl up in ready-made pens, stone-bodied angels clomp about like Ray Harryhausen creations lit from within by sparklers, and the forbidden fruit beats like a living heart. At the same time, the world of Noah is dirty and violent and replete with the depravity of desperate people. These are men and women of myth, but they exist as real men and women –by turns faithful, doubtful, hopeful, vengeful, awful, and beautiful. A film like DeMille’s The Ten Commandments gives us something of the grandeur of Biblical narrative; Aronofsky’s Noah seems more intent on showing us something of the narrative’s humanity.

     After the visuals, the movie’s greatest assets are its characters. They are few, of course, but this allows those who are filled out to actually achieve some resonance. Winstone’s Tubal-cain, for example, is no stock villain. He’s a ruthless man, to be sure, but his concerns are quite fair: why does the Creator choose to kill some of those creatures made in his image and spare others? Like Noah, he wishes to survive – he is simply willing to go to different lengths to do so (it is in keeping with Aronofsky’s visual style that Noah and Tubal-cain often mirror each other in look and manner - variations on a theme again). Connelly likewise is allowed to make Naameh not some long-suffering spouse, but an equal and differing personality to her husband’s, also willing to do unusual things to pursue her vision of the future. Also of note is Lerman as the conflicted Ham, who respects his father, but not all of his father’s ways. The mystical, eccentric Methuselah is a role very much up Hopkins’s alley, and he makes the most of it (the character’s curmudgeonly nostalgia for the ripe berries now mostly missing from a despoiled world provides some of Noah’s few real moments of comic relief). Noah is Crowe’s movie, however. He must essentially play Noah as three men – the hopeful, pre-vision family man; the ark-builder driven by conviction and divine fiat; and the mournful, guilt-wracked survivor of what is essentially world-wide genocide, looking for consolation. This is not an easy journey, but Crowe has long excelled at principled men backed into tight spots, and he uses that to great advantage as Noah. Noah is not a nice man, nor even really a holy one – but Crowe plays him as someone who wants to be a good man, even as he comes to fear that good men are an impossibility. It’s a riveting performance. After all – what would it be like to really be in Noah’s shoes, in the moment, letting millions die while you and your family float to safety? What would it really feel like to be deeply and seriously tasked with responsibility by the Creator of all that is?

     When the film focuses on these human aspects of the Noah tale, it captivates, and these moments make it easier to forgive some of its more indulgent ones (the protracted battle for the ark, for example…but, then, wouldn’t those outside fight to get in? Wouldn’t you?). The movie is about something (which is always admirable), and is about it in a way that often goes for broke (which is its own kind of admirable). Noah’s visuals provoke comment, and its themes provoke thought. It is not a movie for everyone’s taste, and, despite the omnipresence of cuddly Noahs in nursery décor, it is not a movie for young children. For those inclined to struggle with a good story, however, Noah represents an intriguing voyage.

PS – I should say something about the midrashic nature of the film. I believe I’m plain above that Noah takes liberties with the straight Biblical account – some sanctioned by Judeo-Christian lore and tradition, some not. All film adaptations of texts, whatever their genre, make changes simply as a matter of shifting from written to visual storytelling. This is true for scriptural adaptations as well as fictional ones – as true of The Ten Commandments as Ben Hur. I distinctly recall a Jewish professor of mine in graduate school explaining to a Christian questioner that his tradition taught him to argue with and struggle with the scripture. Aronofsky,  a “cultural Jew” by upbringing, has put Noah in that tradition. It adds and interprets, but it does so in a deeply serious way. Midrash was done in an attempt to maintain the integrity of scripture, because the rabbis were uncomfortable with the ideas of gaps and inconsistencies in their sacred text. Obviously, the answers were there to be found, and could illuminate the message rather than obscure it. Aronofsky’s film proposes his own questions and answers about the story of Noah, but, I believe, in a way that he feels highlights and deepens the wisdom and challenge of the Genesis account. Nothing in the film, for example, questions the existence of the Creator, nor the fact of His judgment – rather, the film and its characters wrestle with the nature of the Creator and His judgment. The film depicts Noah in some ways he is not often shown, and some are disturbing. But a story of a world-drowning flood, and of a God who would despair of His own creations is, by nature, disturbing. Noah goes to the heart of that disturbance, and looks for meaning and, ultimately, hope there. That it does so with some of the trappings of a Hollywood blockbuster will strike some as remarkable and others as unfortunate. Both are legitimate responses, with their own justifications. For the record, however, I fall in the former camp.