BY FRED BLOSSER
Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah†(2014) is an interesting but
flawed movie, more successful in set-up than pay-off.
The great Cecil B. DeMille established the standard for
the old-school Biblical epic: a lot of spectacle, as much titillation as the
censors would allow, and a little homespun piety. Aronofsky takes a more ambitious tack,
combining Old Testament scripture, Jewish tradition, and Biblical Apocrypha to
explore weighty spiritual and philosophical issues. His backdrop is a stark antediluvian world of
volcanic crags and dry watercourses, from which the elaborate trappings of
classic spectacles like “Samson and Delilah†(1949), “The Ten Commandmentsâ€
(1956), and “Ben-Hur†(1959) are notably absent.
The descendants of Cain, led by their brutal king
Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), have scratched out a primitive industrial
civilization from their hardscrabble environment. They rail at the Creator (the script never
uses the word “Godâ€) for having exiled Adam and Eve from Eden nine generations
before. “He cursed us to struggle by the
sweat of our brow to survive,†Tubal-Cain rages. “Damned if I don't do everything it takes to
do just that.†In contrast, the
descendants of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, represented by Noah (Russell
Crowe), his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connolly), their three sons, and their
adopted daughter Ila (Emma Watson), respect “the Creator’s land†and try to
conserve its resources: “We only collect what we can use, what we need.â€
Noah begins to experience visions of a deluge. Consulting his grandfather, Methuselah
(Anthony Hopkins), he intuits that the Creator, disappointed with mankind’s
cruelty and greed, intends to destroy His experiment with a Great Flood and
start over. Noah and his family are to
build an ark that will house a male and a female from each animal species. Animals, innocent of sin, will survive and
replenish the world after the waters recede. Noah initially believes that he and his family will be allowed to
survive too, as reward for having lived righteously. The Creator provides a forest from which Noah
and his family can harvest timber for the ark, helped by the Watchers, fallen
angels incarnated as stony giants: “We chose to try and help mankind and when
we disobeyed the Creator, he punished us. We were encrusted by your world. Rock
and mud shackled our fiery glow.â€
The first part of the film, in which Aronofsky clearly
delights in presenting the visual and thematic details of his lost world, is
slow-moving but impressively imaginative. This is not history according to anthropology and geology, but
prehistory according to the accounts of the Fall and the first Patriarchs in
Genesis, as interpreted by Aronofsky. The only community shown in detail is a makeshift village that looks
like a squatters’ camp. Weapons are made
of crudely hammered iron. Clothing is
rough and stitched-together. Several
details, some obvious like the Watchers and others more subtle, reinforce the
viewer’s awareness that this is a different Earth pre-dating ours; look closely
and see what differences you notice.
Unfortunately, Aronofsky loses his exhilaration and
takes several dramatic missteps even before the Deluge arrives in fine CGI
scenes. Sneaking through Tubal-Cain’s
camp, Noah realizes (or decides) that he and his family are just as guilty of
sin in the Creator’s eyes as the despoilers are, and that they are not meant to
procreate either. When his son Ham
rescues a girl from Tubal-Cain’s followers and tries to flee with her to the
ark, Noah leaves her to her death. When
he learns that his adopted daughter is pregnant with Shem’s baby, he determines
to kill the child after it is born (“it’s not something I want to do, it’s what
I have to doâ€). Much of the latter part
of the film sinks into overblown melodrama as Noah and stowaway Tubal-Cain
fight in the ark, resentful son Ham simmers, and after Ila gives birth to not
one baby but two, Noah glowers and stalks toward them with a knife. His next actions as holds the blade over the
infants seem as arbitrarily motivated as his earlier epiphany.
It’s difficult to tell whether Aronofsky tried to load
the script with more philosophical freight than the dialogue and the running time
could bear, or whether his star simply lacked the range needed to convey the
complex emotions that the scenes call for. Crowe is sturdy enough in the sequences that play to his strengths,
principally those in which Noah stands down Tubal-Cain and supervises the
building of the ark, but those requiring a believable display of spiritual
conviction, tenderness, or a sudden transition from one to the other fall
flat. Ray Winstone’s Tubal-Cain
similarly comes up short of the high benchmark for Biblical movie villainy set
by George Sanders in “Samson and Delilah,†Peter Ustinov in “Quo Vadis†(1951),
Jay Robinson in “The Robe†(1953), Edward G. Robinson in “The Ten
Commandments,†and Herbert Lom in “The Big Fisherman†(1959), but he may have
done his best with what Aronofsky handed him. Anthony Hopkins enlivens the scenes that feature Methuselah, who wanders
into Noah’s story from a different chapter of Genesis in the way that
characters crossed over from one Book of the Old Testament to another in the
old DeMille epics.
The Blu-ray disc in Paramountâ€s Blu-ray, DVD, and
Digital HD combo offers crisp images and strong colors -- to the extent that
any colors emerge from the predominantly gray tones of the natural setting and
the brown tones of the characters’ clothing. There are three informative special features -- “Iceland: Extreme
Beauty†(Iceland provided the movie’s stony landscape),“The Ark Exterior: A
Battle for 300 Cubits,†and “The Ark Interior: Animals Two by Two.â€
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