Darren Aronofsky (2014)

What’s incomprehensible is that some critics think Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is a crazy but unarguably entertaining farrago.  It’s so boring – the oppressive music, the actors’ relentless misery, the mainly gloomy colouring, the repeated movement of the camera pulling out to reveal one apocalyptic panorama after another.  (Aronofsky’s usual collaborators, Clint Mansell and Matthew Libatique, were responsible for, respectively, the score and the cinematography.)  Shortly before the film opened, the New Yorker ran a profile of Aronofsky and the making of this film.   It’s true that I’ve seen only his two most recent movies but it’s beyond me how this kind of treatment is merited.  Perhaps the New Yorker was doubtful too:  it certainly seemed to give undue emphasis to the green agenda of Noah, in which the title character is portrayed as the first environmentalist.  This contemporary, politically correct angle allowed some intelligent people to feel intelligent enjoying Avatar and the only relief in Aronofsky’s movie is that the environmentalism doesn’t come across as prominently as I’d feared (though there may be more sermonising than I was able to hear).  While the mostly grim landscape and outfits suggest dystopian sci-fi rather than Hollywood biblical epic, Aronofsky reverts to biblical supernaturalism whenever he needs it.  The spiritual power of Noah’s grandfather Methusaleh turns a barren girl fertile.  The dove that signals the flood is over is modern only in that it’s a CGI bird.  Some of the meteorological highlights are presented as heavenly interventions in a fairly traditional way (the film concludes with a rainbow over the restored world).  Aronofsky’s professed ‘non-denominational’ approach is laughably shallow (although it still seems to have managed to offend various groups).  He simply refers to ‘the Creator’ rather than ‘God’.

It’s easy enough to find things to deride in Noah:  the Ark, a wooden drilling platform outside and a Tardis inside; the time-lapse (to put it mildly) photography sprint through creation (strobe effects were created on the first day so I had to look away for most of this); the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so misshapen by corruption that it couldn’t have been appetising; the Watchers, a group of fallen angels who help Noah out as required – they’re a cross between a giant’s Meccano set and massive, concatenated broccoli.  (It’s beyond a joke that so much money has been spent on this film.)  In Genesis, Tubalcain is a very minor character but he is a descendant of Cain and ‘the forger of all implements of bronze and iron’ so this is enough to make him the chief villain of Noah.  A hubristic industrialist and borderline atheist, Tubalcain is played by Ray Winstone so when he yells to the skies that he will create ‘a race of men in my own image’ it is a truly alarming prospect.  To be fair, though, Winstone occasionally looks almost distinguished and tries to sound it but the Sairf London vowels keep showing.  There was plenty of stuff in the New Yorker (in David Denby’s review of the film as well as the Aronofsky profile) about how incredible and outrageous it was that God should have wanted to kill off everyone except Noah and his family.  Aronofsky and Ari Handel, who co-wrote the script with him, negotiate this neatly.   Even at the start of the picture, there seem to be very few people around except the family.  Tubalcain’s brutal collective are most of the world population and you’re more than happy to see the back of them.

Russell Crowe plays Noah with considerable, if futile, integrity.  Noah is not just a stern, don’t-pick-the-flowers environmentalist and, in his interminable Ark-building, a humourless DIY fanatic.  He also believes so strongly that men are disposed to do wrong that he wants to see humanity wiped out.  If men and women survive the flood, he says, they’ll repeat the sins of Adam, Eve and, especially, Cain all over again.   He therefore expects his three sons to be the world’s last men and he’s horrified by Methusaleh (Anthony Hopkins)’s magic touch that means that Shem’s wife Ila can conceive after all.  When he prepares to kill Ila’s twin baby girls but finds his infanticidal hand stayed by human kindness, Crowe brings off Noah’s change of heart as only a fine actor can (but I didn’t understand who Noah thought was going to impregnate these girls in due course).  The film reunites the husband-and-wife pairing of A Beautiful Mind:  as Mrs Noah, Jennifer Connelly’s strained anxiety is, as usual, a pain.  At least the melodrama here wrenches some volume out of her.  Emma Watson as Ila is irrepressibly twenty-first century home counties.  Douglas Booth as Shem is somewhat less dull than Logan Lerman as Ham but it’s Leo McHugh Carroll as Japheth who’s the most distinctive of Noah’s three sons:  he’s so weirdly androgynous that I wondered if Japheth, who his father expects to be the last man of all, might be able to continue the line by himself.  The Watchers are voiced by, among others, Nick Nolte and Frank Langella although I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t read it.

15 April 2014