Noah (2014)

Film: Noah (2014)

Stars: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Darren Aronofsky was always in a bit of a pickle tackling the Bible, as is any artist trying to take a stab at the best-selling book of all-time.  That’s because you toe the line when you try to tackle a religious subject-do you make carbon copies of the biblical stories, creating saints and pious men, or do you try and humanize the characters with flaws and sins?  It’s a tough conundrum, as the former lends to boring stories (and competing with the epic grandeur of Cecil B. DeMille and William Wyler) and the latter to religious backlash.

Unfortunately, for a man who has tried to make this film for as long as I can remember (I love when great director’s spend an eternity on their pet projects), he seems to have tried to do both of these things, neither with much success.  It’s one of the most famous stories of all-time, so spoilers shouldn’t be necessary, but here’s the alert anyway.  Noah is a story of a man who builds an ark based on blind faith, but the film never quite has the gall to question his motives or to find any insanity in the story.  It instead wants its cake and attempts to eat it too, but what we get is bloated and rotten.

The biggest problems with the film are the treatment of the central character.  Noah’s story has always been one of the more far-fetched in the Bible, just behind Jonah.  How could a senior citizen build a giant boat that saw the entire world covered in water, and then survive with just two of every animal?  I mean, it’s a tough one to grasp, and so to literally tell the story would be too easy.  Aronofsky tries to make Noah an extremely pious man, sometimes too anchored in his own beliefs to be able to see the grey in life, but he cannot quite get to the point where he is a “bad man.”  He keeps Noah very much on the verge of going into the darkness, of being the villain in this parable, without actually taking the plunge.

The better question would have been if he had subtracted some of the heavenly confirmations in the film.  How much more spectacular would the film have been (and less mixed message) if we saw no literal signs from God that the world was coming to an end?  If there were no stone angels (initially a neat effect, but quite ancillary and probably not worth the trouble) and no specific lights from God, we would have to completely base these decisions on Noah’s faith alone, which makes the film at once more complicated and far more interesting.  Faith is a hard thing to see when you don’t have literal confirmation of it-how different does the Noah story become if we don’t know for sure that his turning his back on the innocent is God’s purpose?

I mean, Aronofsky goes there with a couple of other scenes-considering the big budget, I'm surprised that, say, incest manages to make it into the plot of the film (it's pretty well-implied that Noah's two younger sons will eventually bed their nieces), though they do leave out the most famous incestuous moment (the interpretation that, Ham, here played by Logan Lerman, rapes his father after his father is found drunk).  The movie is not shy on biblical allusions or about showing a man-of-faith in the film, something that actually does ring of a bit of a game-changer (I hate to side with the right-wingers here, but you do rarely see outspoken people of faith in large budget cinema...then again, you rarely see women over fifty, people of color, or gay people in large budget cinema, so my sympathies only extend so far).

I guess my big problem, though, is that for a director who has had this vision for so long, why is there not more artistic license with the story?  The telling of the film becomes very literal, and with the major exception of Ray Winstone's story, follows the Bible in a pretty consistent way.  We get only one good person who we know dies as a result of the flood-the rest of the world is left in a sea of violence, rape, and murder.  It's a whole lot easier to let Noah's conscience off the hook if he's killing a hoard of pillagers and half-humans.  From a director as daring as Aronofsky, I'm surprised that he spent so much of his budget on rocky angels and less on a more cohesive, daring plot.  And the special effects are so damn spotty (was the scene of the family walking supposed to look like a de Mille special effect, because it did and if you're going to go there do it more than once so you don't just look cheap), it all falls apart behind-the-scenes and in the writer's room.  About the only thing that does ring true is the environmental and vegetarian message (both brought about quite well in contrast with the horrifying Ray Winstone character), but that's not a lot to lend itself to a film.

While the acting is for-the-most part the saving grace of the movie, it also doesn't have a great level of consistency.  Crowe, a movie star that has basically disappeared, still has the gravitas he had in films like Gladiator to lend himself to the screen, but Connelly as his wife only gets one truly great moment (an Oscar-y speech...if this film had any chance at the Oscars) but otherwise is just window dressing.  Emma Watson, who is on a roll creatively right now, makes the most of an underwritten character (the same cannot be said for Anthony Hopkins, who has been on autopilot for fifteen years or so).  And I actually genuinely liked the wide-eyed naivete of Logan Lerman, though some others I've found disagreed.  Worst of the bunch is Ray Winstone's unrealistically evil Tubal-Cain, who chews scenery like a random snake that he finds while stowing away on the ark.  Winstone is so bad but so omnipresent my thoughts keep coming back to him instead of the sturdy Crowe, Watson, and Lerman, which is never a good sign for a director like Aronofsky, who specializes in making you remember his best performances.

All-in-all, with only a few performances to lend itself, Noah can most generously be described as an ambitious failure-the signs of a director who learned his limitations.  Aronofsky has enough skills to pick himself up and find a new story to tell, but hopefully he'll leave the Good Book alone.