By ALAN SWERDLOW
Noah / Directed by Darren Aronofsky / PG13
So it seems that Noah was the first eco-warrior, fighting for both animal and vegetal rights, and was a most probable vegan to boot. So far, so good – director Aronofsky is hardly retiring when it comes to making bold suppositions and it seems he likes being seen as an “interpreter” of things. After all, the crusading vessel of Greenpeace is called The Rainbow Warrior, right? We all know that the first mention of a rainbow comes in Genesis, so casting Noah and his Ark in a distinctly green light is hardly wildly radical.
So far, so-so. Noah, as a film, is recounted by Aronofsky as a frustratingly uneven tale: when it is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad…..well, let’s be charitable and say that the word that comes to mind is “risible”.
So what hath Aronofsky wrought? It appears that the descendants of Cain inherited the earth and weren’t terribly meek about it, forging metal weapons and building great cities and fornicating and coveting neighbours’ wives and doing all the things that Al Gore tried to warn us about, so by the time the film really gets going the landscape looks a lot like the “After” photographs of Hiroshima. Noah, after a prologue that gives us a quick condensed version of the Creation up to the murder of Abel, and a hard day gathering and tending (no hunting for this eco-warrior) has disturbing dreams in which the Earth seeps blood. What else is a proto-family to do but go off to visit Grandpa, who is Methusaleh, but actually Anthony Hopkins in disguise. He appears to keep himself very busy despite his advanced years, dispensing sage advice and living in the Ur-set of Ur-Moonraker (before they got it all clean and shiny). He is also very busy stealing the film, which he does effortlessly, and tips Noah the wink about Ark building and the coming flood. I had to fight very hard to keep memories of Bill Cosby’s inspired riff on the story out of my head (“Right! …..What’s a cubit?”), but Aronofsky diverts us with some remarkable imagery and small-scale domestic dramas that keep the bombast at bay for a while.
The CG visuals are often effective, though why 3D was selected as a format is beyond me since it is lame and pointless apart from the usual quota of snakes slithering towards you and the odd spear or raindrop whizzing through the air, as well as some God’s eye-view pans. God is never mentioned in the film, by the way, but there is a lot of reference to The Creator instead. And then there are The Watchers, who are fallen angels who have given up on watching over mankind, and look like nothing so much as coals in a really good braai with a perfect mix of ash, cokey bits and incandescence. They are also very, very big (“there were giants in those days” apparently, so Aronofsky opts for gigantism all round), have multiple arms and speak like Nick Nolte after two packets of cigarettes and half a bottle of Jack Daniels. Actually, I think it’s quite a good sound, though it’s augmented by various stony clunks and gravelly landslides – the sound that all that wet Eskom coal must have made as it dried.
The Watchers take to Noah because of his eco-message and help defend him and the Ark against the ravening hordes of the Cain-ites and so the story plays out more-or-less as we know it with enough Aronofskian heresies to pique our interest and keep things humming. Chief among these is the suggestion that Noah might be taking his interpretation of the Creator’s intensions up the wrong path. He may even be a little bos-bedonnerd, what with all that obsession about plants and letting them grow, but Noah (spoiler alert) seems to think that the idea is to save the animals and the plants and then, since his family will be the only human survivors, simply die off, conveniently consigning humans to extinction. He rather uncharitably informs a non-comprehending Japheth that there will be no-one left to bury him, sorry, but he does engender enough conflict to hold our attention since we know how the story ends once the Ark is afloat and the dove has returned with the olive branch.
In addition, Aronofsky solves the problem of all that animal pooh fouling up the bottom of the Ark, by having Noah and the family place them into a comatose state with the aid of various smoking herbs, leaves and bark. Clearly good stuff, that, since it lasts the full forty days and nights!
You have the drift by now, I take it : Aronofsky tells his version with a contemporary eye (and why not. At least we don’t have the stentorian version that John Huston foisted on us in “The Bible – in the beginning”), and enough aversion to literality and hokum to make things interesting at the very least. Noah’s drunkenness seems a perfectly understandable response to family hostility and all that hard work (though given the grimace on Crowe’s face, it seems that 1 is not a Good Year). And Aronofsky is not averse to the notion of miracles, with gigantic forests springing up in an instant from the parched earth and the like.
When it comes to the acting, there’s the good, the bad and the indifferent. For the most part Russell Crowe stomps about like Winnie the Pooh and the Bothersome Day, except for when he gets really perturbed and it’s Winnie the Pooh and the Pounding Headache. When he goes head to head with his horny, troubled middle son, and a fair level of intensity and bluster comes to the fore, you can’t escape the thought that there are, in fact, two Hams up there on the screen.
Ray Winstone gets one splendid moment as Tubal-Cain when he idly chomps on a reptile while making a theological point, otherwise it’s Winnie the Pooh’s Evil Twin, and Emma Watson tries valiantly to erase all thoughts of Hogwarts but she isn’t given much to work with other than painful contractions, some latex scars and a furrowed brow. At least Jennifer Connelly gets nobility of purpose, lucky her.
I can’t help considering the feeling that Aronofsky wants us to be a lot more outraged at his interpretation than we actually are. It all makes for entertaining and interesting spectacle with some splendid imagery and conceits, but I hardly suspect intense discussions and post-mortems will follow after seeing the film, around eco-theology and eco-revisionism and how many eco-fallen angels can dance on the head of an eco-pin.
I did wrestle with the existential truth that Aronofsky could deal with the whole of Creation in a visually absorbing matter of two minutes or so, but takes an unconscionably long time dealing with the rest.
