I do not know what drives a man to nurture this concept for so long, but it clearly wasn't religious faith. And it also clearly wasn't an irreligious tendency leading him to critique the faith of others. I'm not sure what that leaves, but Noah isn't the kind of movie that's interested in being easily pegged down. The one word that best describes it above all others is "weird"; if we allow ourselves two, I would go with "fucking weird".
At any rate, it's vintage Aronofsky: where Black Swan and The Wrestler both suggested a certain flattening-out of his aesthetic into something reasonably conventional and even realistic at points, Noah jumps headlong back into the metallic colors and expressionistic cutting of his early, idiosyncratic ones. It is not the film's signature moment, nor by any means its most characteristic, but the scene in Noah that unquestionably has stuck the most in my brain is a montage, against a pungent, cherry-red sunset, of silhouettes of murder and war, with a quick succession (like, "two or three frames per image" quick) of profiles of soldiers from the Paleolithic right up to the 20th Century attacking, and a quick succession of profiles of their victims falling back in death agonies. It is garish and brave and stupid and wholly visionary, in the sense that it makes an emphatic point using image and editing and sound without any need to rely on words, and it is a moment that made me think two thoughts at the exact same time: "I am so thrilled that Aronofsky is back in his gonzo phase without a hint of apology" and "Wow, I'd forgotten how goddamn annoying Aronofsky's movies are."
But you know who doesn't care what I or anyone else thinks about Darren Aronofsky's filmmaking? Darren Aronofsky. Good, bad, or ugly, Noah is a transcendently personal piece of cinema, telling a weird version of the iconic story that, while not contradicting a single word of the Torah, ends up a piece of overheated fantasy in ancient Hebrew drag, colliding ideas from the religious text, the rabbinical texts elucidating the religious text, and the author's own mind, and turning out something that's half '50s Bible movie, half Lord of the Rings (the rock angels are a dead ringer for the Ents in The Two Towers - oh, yes, there are rock angels), half Soviet Montage, half work of grimy historical realism that finds Aronofsky and his longterm cinematographer Matthew Libatique parading around a series of muddy greys in between the more dazzling, chromatic fantasy landscapes and evocatively deep shadows of the Ark interior.
There's so much visual and tonal excess that it would almost be possible to lose sight of the family drama that Aronofsky has fashioned out of the story, except for the operatic rage with which he and the actors portray that drama. Here, Noah (Russell Crowe) isn't just a personality-free patriarch, but a tormented man of principle who believes deep in his soul that he has been charged with stewarding the whole of creation though a massive apocalypse, and who is certain that he and his kin have no place in this new order other than to observe it and die, saving the planet from the ravages of mankind that have brought it so close to ruin (that is, incidentally, the whole of the alleged "environmentalist" message, and anyone who lets that offend them, out of all the wacky shit going on here, went in looking to be offended). It's a role written in bold, broad strokes and emphatic emotions, and Crowe breathes life into with the most robust, alive performance he's given in a decade or more.
And the rest of the characters are… that's part of the problem, ain't it? As much as Noah is enthusiastic about providing a totally modern experience in some ways, in others its as ossified and dusty as any plodding epic from the days of The Robe, and that includes its treatment of the supporting players, who with the possible exception of Ray Winstone as the unnuanced villain Tubalcain, the human king looking to steal the ark and replace Noah as the chief conduit for the unnamed creator of the universe, play stock characters with stock emotions. It's all well and good for Aronofsky's script to specifically indict the authority of old men who insist that they alone can correctly interpret the lessons handed down by God (and he so indicts), but it's hard to give the film any anti-patriarchy points when the best it can do for its female characters is to cast Jennifer Connelly as the Loyal Wife Who Is Clearer-Headed Than Her Husband (Who Cries), and Emma Watson as the Clever, Preternaturally Wise Young Pregnant Woman (Who Cries). And they're robust paragons of human drama compared to Noah's sons, Shem (Douglas Booth) and Ham (Logan Lerman), the latter of whom at least gets to shade some resentment into his bland meat prop of a role, but only in the film's last half.
The balance between the realistic, the heavily stylised, and the insipidly hokey is one that Noah proudly ignores: achingly corny dramatic touches and overwrought visual metaphors sit right alongside some brilliantly fragmentary, high-contrast dream images, effectively high-scale fantasy-style action scenes, and an outstanding sound mix (the damp wooden creaks and sleepy animal noises inside the Ark make for one of the most persuasive movie spaces in a long while). Undeliverable wooden dialogue gives way to some wonderfully tiny and humane character moments. Anthony Hopkins is more subdued than he's been in some years, and then starts babbling about berries for like, 40 minutes in the next instant.
It is messy as all hell, and wonderfully incoherent, pummeling along with enough momentum that it's not hard to overlook how utterly it fails to draw all of its shifting moods and thematic threads into any kind of conclusion. But at the same time, it doesn't disguise that failure, either. Anyway, I am very glad that I saw the movie, and I am also virtually certain that it's no damn good at all: but it's completely singular and an obvious passion project, and its sloppy weirdness has the merit of being very much unlike anything else out there.
5/10-ish. But number ratings are really not appropriate in this case.
Man, I just thought this was dreadfully boring. Its a confused film, never really knowing if it wanted to be an arty philosophical exploration or a big dramatic blockbuster, and it does neither. The two and half hours sluggishly move through the first half, which is like a bad LotR film, and then kinda rolls about in the second half where its a ridiculous melodrama with a lazy silly third act knife fight with the guy who killed his father. The characters aren't characters, their cliche-spouting robots in human skin, bland automations trapped in protracted dramatic conflicts. Its a visually dry film, awash in a sea of unending murky browns and greys and drab lighting. There are the little sub-plots, like Ham's petulant need a wife that never gains any kind of dramatic traction and really feels like a distraction, or the evolution montage that feels like a Discovery Channel clip being fast-forwarded. There's perhaps one interesting shot, the ark floating in the background as the people on the rock cry for help. But after that it goes back to its rudderless meandering chamber piece.
ReplyDeleteCrowe is about as one dimensional as ever, all steely glances and manly glowering, never allowing us to care about the man caught between his job and his family like The Insider. Others like Connelly seem both underbaked(spends most of the film grinding herbs or confused reaction shots) and then suddenly overcooked and spilling all over the place near the end.
It feels exactly like a film that has been expanded from three Bible chapters to the multiplex(and we stone Peter Jackson for milking The Hobbit!), with little coherent vision on what exactly it wanted to do, why it was made, or who exactly it was for. Bloated, sour, dour, and yet goofy as all hell, its just like you said, fuckin' WEIRD. I mean, props for making a weird $140 million dollar Bible adaptation, but that is simply all I can grant it. Ambition is nothing to be sneered at. I admire ambition. But ambition isn't excellence, and all the hard work in the world won't help when it focused on something as turgid and misshapen as Darren Aronofsky's Noah.
From what I've read, what attracted Aronofsky to this story was Noah himself, this man who let all of humanity die because he was told to and the guilt he must have felt. I think Aronofsky has always been fascinated by characters who are so committed to something and the price they have to pay for that commitment, like Nina with her ballet or Randy the Ram with wrestling. In this case, it's the story of a man committed to the word of God. This is an exploration of faith and how that faith can be damaging, especially when it's that faith that's telling you to kill someone. It's a study of a man and what his faith makes him do, makes him merciless when he's supposed to be better than that. As such, I found the film, messy as it is, to be very unique. Also, knowing the director is Aronofsky allowed me to tolerate the melodrama and the over-the-top flourishes in the same way I tolerate this stuff when I watch a Baz Luhrmann movie. Anyway, those are my two cents. And, yes, it's great to be reminded how good an actor Russell Crowe is (though I was actually impressed with Emma Watson, who is building quite an impressive post-Harry Potter resumé, having now worked with Aronofsky and Sofia Coppola.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised, Tim, that you think the words "conventional" and "realistic" describe Black Swan better than Noah. While Black Swan left us wondering what if anything should be taken as real, Noah was straight-forward and, in my view, amazing.
ReplyDeleteI love how Aronofsky has made a movie that is a serious meditation on passages of the Hebrew Bible, but would be equally interesting for a Buddhist. Even an atheist can easily enjoy this as a parable about environmentalism. (Would anyone with no connection to Christianity have any use for The Passion of the Christ? Or for The Last Temptation of Christ?) And for the religious audience, how refreshing to find a filmmaker who doesn't arrogantly believe he can speak for God, and a film in fact taking the stance that while God's existence may be beyond question, God's will is a matter of guesswork and interpretation, even for a prophet.
Like Christopher Nolan's best blockbusters, Noah uses conventions of Hollywood entertainment to explore philosophical ideas. But he's more focused on the ideas than Nolan has ever been.
It's a fair criticism that the characters here are thin, but this isn't a film about characters, it's a film about ideas, and Aronofsky presents them with richness and with boldness but without arrogance.
I also found Noah mostly enthralling, and I agree that it holds up to a thematic reading. It's a fantasy epic on... not acid necessarily, but probably shrooms. Either way I'd say it's enlivened by Aronofsky's indulgences (the Ray Harrenhausen cg is an inspired touch) more so than it's weighed down. Tubal-Cain and Noah are also both rather good characters, who help anchor the movie more than its given credit for - which still isn't too say terribly well.
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