(040414)
What would happen if one were to take the scant hundred or so verses of Genesis
devoted to Noah and the Flood, and expand them into a two-plus-hour Hollywood
blockbuster by adding liberal doses of Tolkien, Avatar, Mad Max, and a Roland
Emmerich disaster movie? This is not a question I had contemplated until I was
presented with its answer in the form of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. Though
considerably vaster in scope (and budget) than any of the director’s previous
undertakings, it is no less idiosyncratic than his other work, from Pi to
Black Swan.
The result is an odd and original film, part CGI spectacle and part somber moral
meditation. Although occasionally preposterous, it is rarely short of
fascinating.
Though an atheist himself, Aronofsky is able to adhere to the spirit—and, where
possible, the limited details—of his adopted text. Following the fall and the
first murder, humankind descended in two lines: the wicked progeny of Cain and
the virtuous progeny of Seth. Over the course of eight generations, however, the Cainites have spread across the globe like a cancer, while the Sethians have
dwindled until Noah is the last of his line. When the latter comes fully of age
(technically when he’s around 600 years old, though as played by Russell Crowe
in the film he seems considerably younger), the Creator decides to purge the
corrupted world of life, with the exception of Noah, his immediate family, and
as many mated animal pairs as they can squeeze into an ark. Here come the birds,
spiraling majestically into Noah’s giant box of a boat; then the amphibians and
reptiles, hopping and slithering; and finally a rumbling herd of the hooved,
toed, and clawed. (The fish, presumably, can fend for themselves.)
Working from these familiar beginnings, Aronofsky begins his extravagant
narrative embroidery. After some early mutual suspicion, Noah is befriended by
the Watchers, grotesque fallen angels that resemble Peter Jackson’s Ents, except
that they’re made out of stone and sport six arms. These powerful creatures
(loosely based on references to the Nephilim in Genesis) not only provide the
labor to build the massive ark, but also protection from the barbarian hordes,
led by King Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), who would very much like to book passage
on Noah’s ship when the rains begin to fall.
The Watchers may be Aronofsky’s most peculiar addition, but there are other
fantasy elements woven into his tale as well: the glowing energy pellets used to
make fire (and primitive firearms); the divine seed with which Noah causes a
lush forest to arise from a blighted landscape; the narcotic herbal smoke that
he and his wife, Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) use to put their zoological
passengers into a deep slumber. Adding to the overall air of magic and
polytheism are the presences among the cast of an erstwhile Odin (Anthony
Hopkins, as Noah’s grandfather Methuselah), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson, as
adopted daughter Ila), and Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman, as son Ham).
Aronofsky's own beliefs may be mirrored in the films most compelling visual
moment. Noah tells his children the story of creation. While the narrative that
we hear him speak is from Genesis, the accompanying visuals that we get from the
director are a bravura time-lapse sequence that depicts evolution. It's as
though the atheist Aronofsky is attempting to find a middle ground. Perhaps
asking if it's possible for these two disparate notions to coexist in the same
universe.
But despite its flamboyant, and at times goofy, fantasy trappings, Noah is
firmly anchored by the fierce moral intensity of Aronofsky’s vision, which is,
if anything, more Old Testament than the Old Testament itself. Renditions of the
Flood narrative—including the Bible’s—tend to focus on the lucky fate of Noah
and his flock rather than that of the millions left behind to die. Aronofsky, by
contrast, is unsparing in his portrayal of their agonies. The most striking
image of the film is a pinnacle of victims that juts briefly above the waves—a
human pyramid of desperate, clawing terror—before being swallowed by them. Even
within the ark, the cries of the doomed echo like an infernal whale song.
Aronofsky is likewise quite explicit in his depiction of Noah, however
righteous, as a knowing accomplice in an act of global genocide. He is a man who
believes that it is God’s will that the human race—all of it, his own family
included—not be allowed to further corrupt the Earth with its presence. It’s a
role tailor-made for Crowe, whose zealous conviction (evident even in such
dubious castings as
Les Miserables)
is here taken to the brink of madness.
Indeed, arguably the film’s greatest infidelities to its source material involve
neither igneous angels nor antediluvian dilithium crystals, but rather two
narrative developments I will not disclose, which provide the principal drama
and moral tension of the film’s final third. The first involves a life-or-death,
faith-or-family ethical dilemma that Aronofsky has invented for Noah (one with
powerful echoes of the choice faced by his notable 11th-generation descendant,
Abraham). And the second involves Aronofsky’s uses of the character Tubal-Cain,
the barbarian king. As the film progresses, it becomes an dialectic between the
moral visions espoused by Tubal-Cain (on behalf of a sinful human race) and Noah
(on behalf of a ruthless God).
On the one hand, Tubal-Cain is a bloodthirsty brute: a killer of men, despoiler
of the land, and committed proponent of the ethos that might makes right. On the
other hand, he is, in the most literal sense possible, a humanist—particularly
in comparison with Noah, for whom he serves as a kind of narrative twin and
foil. It is Noah, after all, who believes that “justice” requires the end of the
human race, and Tubal-Cain who argues that women and children (and, obviously,
he himself) have as much right to a berth on the ark as any python or
wildebeest. Moreover, if Tubal-Cain is in rebellion against God, it is at least
in part because he believes that God has abandoned humankind. “No one’s heard
from the Creator since he marked Cain. We are orphan children,” he laments at
one point. At another, he beseeches God, “I am a man, made in Your image. Why
will you not converse with me?”
As Aronofsky’s film progresses, it becomes an implicit dialectic between the
competing moral visions espoused by Tubal-Cain (on behalf of a sinful human
race) and Noah (on behalf of a ruthless God). And to say that neither option is
an appealing one—violent chaos versus obedient self-extinction—would be an
obvious understatement. A third way between these polar alternatives is of
course found, as anyone familiar with the Noah story would presume. (Aronofsky
may grant himself the latitude to devise a few additional moral quandaries, but
he’s not going to rewrite the ending.)
Noah is a strange and occasionally messy hybrid of a film, and some viewers will
be unhappy not only with the liberties it takes but also with the conclusions it
draws (in the latter case, perhaps, from both ends of the
ideological-theological spectrum). Aronofsky has created an epic melodrama that
is at the same time a heartfelt, personal plea for the reconciliation of
often-competing moral codes. “A man isn’t ruled by the heavens,” argues Tubal-Cain
late in the movie. “He is ruled by his will.” In the end, Aronofsky suggests,
neither is sufficient on its own.
|