Saturday, December 23, 2017

Darren Aronofsky, part VII: Wet dreams


NOAH

Upon returning to Noah after three years, I find the opposite of what I thought it was.  Now I know: it's one of the most philosophically-engaged religious films ever made.  That doesn't mean it's one of the best, but it is one of the better ones made lately.

2014
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Written by Dr. Ari Handel and Darren Aronofsky
With Russell Crowe (Noah), Jennifer Connelly (Naameh), Douglas Booth (Shem), Logan Lerman (Ham), Leo McHugh Carroll (Japheth), Emma Watson (Ila), Frank Langella (Og), Nick Nolte (Samyaza), Anthony Hopkins (Methuselah), and Ray Winstone (Tubal-cain)

Spoiler alert: high, I guess, but also N/A


You know, I didn't even mention the strangest thing about Black Swan: it made money.  Like, not "some" money.  It made $329 millionand, with its $13mm budget, you don't have to have gone to Harvard to know that that's a hefty profit.  So, with 2010's most unexpected hit behind him, what was an oddball indie filmmaker with sudden heat and unasked-for clout to do?

Why, make his dream project, of course!  As Aronofsky tells it, the story of the patriarch Noach had fascinated him since childhood, and he had long seen a movie in the material, despite it being only about five pages long (and, as I said three years ago, written with all the passion of a Wikipedia entry).  Alongside his friend, co-alumnus, co-writer, co-producer, and co-religionist Ari Handel, Aronofsky began work on a screenplay, in tandem with the partnership's other, even more mystical exploration of what happened to humankind after its Fall, The Fountain.  (For a pair of Jews-turned-atheists, they turn out to be inordinately concerned with the spiritual; though perhaps this is why I have such fondness for their work.)  Well, fourteen years later, they finally managed to make Noah happen, with $125 million from Paramount and, quite irresponsibly, practically no oversight on how they spent it.

I won't be paraphrasing my 2014 review of Noah too much furtherfrankly, I'm tempted to delete the insipid thingand the most annoying aspect of this second dive into Aronofsky's crazy Biblical blockbuster is having to write a whole new piece about it, my feelings upon the film having changed so completely.  It's still not a great film, I thinkIt's sure as hell not flawless.  But it's kind of great, and so much better than I gave it credit for, that I feel like I should say I'm sorry.

Sorry.

Here's the thing.  You have to realize that Noah's emptied-out hyper-essentialism is its point, and that its reduction of human beings to just another breed of animal is deliberate (and ironic).  Hence its characters must be boiled down to nothing but the basics of their survival: eating; fighting; procreating (not even fucking, as I said in 2014, and this was accurate); raising their resulting children in order to replace themselves; and, because they are still humans, talking about their Creator, and about their perception of His intentions.  When you do finally realize this, that's when everything about Noah magically clicks into place—even the full-tilt melodrama of this film's performances, which are indeed uniformly ghastly in their overwhelming lack of nuance and detail, with that one salient exception.

So: Noah takes on a sliver of the Bible, and is, in effect, a cinematic midrash, a feature-length commentary and interpretation meant to enlighten and question the meaning of the terse verses belonging to the myth of Noah, particularly the Great Flood which Noah oversaw as the appointed caretaker of an ark for all Earth's innocent animals, whilst Noah's God wiped out every other human but those in Noah's immediate family.  To these essentials, Aronofsky and Handel add much in terms of texture, albeit usually with some scintilla of a Biblical basis: the dwindling descendants of Seth, pushed to the margins of antediluvian society in the eight generations since the Fall; the far more numerous descendants of the first murderer Cain, having spread across the world and ruined it with their wickedness; and, most-textured of all, the persistence of the Nephilim, fallen angels who had taken Adam's side against God, and who came down to alleviate the great punishment inflicted upon humankind, and who were punished in their turn by having their divine light fused to the crude earth they'd deigned to make their home.

I mean, I sympathize.  This is exactly what happened to me when I moved to Pittsburgh.

Noah is the last adult in the line of Seth, and he and his familyhis wife, Nameeh, and their three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhetheke a living out of the wasteland.  They eke a daughter out of it too, in the form of Ila, a wounded Cainite adopted from the site of a massacre.  One night, Noah is visited by a dream.  He is shown God's judgment for the world He created: death.  But it is not death by fire, as Noah's grandfather Methuselah assumes when Noah seeks his advice upon the matter; it is death by water.  Fire destroys; water cleanses.  And to preserve that which is worth preserving, Noah is given another vision, of the great ship that he shall build.

This is where it takes an even sharper turn from Biblical fidelity, as Noah builds his ark over the course of many yearsfrom a forest that grew in mere seconds, strangely enough, this representing the final germination of a seed from the Tree of Life (and it's wonderful that this seed is an exact replica of the same seed from The Fountain).  Eventually, he is confronted with the fact that all those other humans would prefer to be on his ark, rather than under forty fathoms of water.  Meanwhile, Noah, convinced beyond doubt of the inevitability and wisdom of God's decisionis God not God?has come to the unavoidable conclusion that his family shall be the last of humankind, his daughter barren from the wound she sustained in her loins all those years ago, and his three sons growing old to be the last men on God's New Earth.  And for all that this is anathema to them, they have to admit they have no other answer but "yes" to that all-important question; again, "is God not God?"  That is, until they can bear it no longer; and Noah, no matter his conviction, cannot reconcile his morality to God's either.


This is what I mean when I say that Noah is a kind of midrash, albeit one told in its own narrative, rather than exegesis (and, obviously, I'm the farthest thing from an expert on rabbinical literature, though Handel, at least, approves of that comparison).  Everything great about the film flows from the terrible struggle Noah has been given, and how helping usher in the end of all things necessarily deranges a man.  (It's a phenomenal example of turning an inactive archetype, such as populate many famous Bible stories, into a proper character.)  The chiefest and most common point of greatness in Noah, then, is Noah himself, Russel Crowe, turning in a performance that plays somewhat against his type as a bellower, and is far more rewarding than I noticed the first time.  Like all Aronofsky heroes, his is a feature-length breakdown, though in this case it begins at about the halfway-point.  (Noah remains Aronofsky's longest film by far, and it's not all time well-spent; some of those ark logistics are about as relevant as a child's Sunday school questions, and just beg to be cut.)  Unlike most Aronofsky heroes, however, Noah's breakdown is quiet and internalizedCrowe does terrific things with just the direction he's pointing his eyes, so often unable to meet a gazeand if it is not the stuff that exciting Bible epics are made of, then it is still what deep, intellectually-invested Bible epics like this one are.

He is contrasted, of course, with the one-note takes of everyone else.  And sometimes not even one: Nameeh is a dutiful partner in genocide until it impacts her bloodline, at which point she erupts into overwritten speechification; Japheth is a non-person entirely, though as a literal child this is fair enough; Shem never rouses to anything beyond Emma Watson's body until the final act; and barren Ila, this being Emma Watson's character, is saddled with the most instrumental female role imaginable.  Ah, and as antagonist to them all, the snake in their Eden, there's Ray Winstone's Tubal-cain, getting the most instrumental male role imaginable, speaking constantly of how he was made in God's image, and, scripturally-speaking, he's right.

Only Logan Lerman's Ham gets to have the mildest bit of complexity, though his feelings of utter betrayal are likewise entirely tied to his reproductive desires, and the fact that Noah is equally keen on frustrating them.  (We are also treated to the circus of Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah.  Aronofsky, cannily enough, deploys Hopkins' late-career check-cashing playfulness in a role that demands almost nothing more than committing to a long, whimsical subplot about berries.  It is, in any event, Noah's one lonely stab toward comedy.  It is funny, just not necessarily in a good way.)

Noah works, though, on this ugly, atavistic level.  It could not work without Crowe and the theodicy at the center of its plot; and yet it couldn't work as a $125 million would-be crowd-pleaser, either, I guess, if not for Aronofsky's wilder flights of fancy, and this is where Noah gets very weird.  And not even always in an Aronofskian way.

Behold!  A medium close-up!

Though Noah reunites the director, once again, with his usual cinematographer Matthew Libatique and usual composer Clint Mansell, it's mostly standardized work for both.  Mansell riffs heavily on his own "Death is the Road to Awe," adding "regular epic music" when called upon; as for the DP, though Noah sees Libatique coming off Black Swan, which indicated something of a return to his and Aronofsky's Pi-style roots, Noah is by far their most conventionally-made film, by any metric you'd care to name, and especially the way it's shot.  (Oh, yes: neither director nor DP are dead, so there's still something to look at here.  We'll get to the best of it shortly.)

But "looking ordinary" kind of makes sense for Noah: the weirdness is, in large part, Aronofsky's avowed intention to make a full-on fantasy movie out of Biblical parts, which means one of the weirdest things he could do is put it together using the somewhat impersonal spectacle of a modern fantasy movie.  After all, there aren't that many religious epics that can be this profitably compared to The Two Towers or Conan the Barbarian (or, more aptly, Conan the Barbarian), with its fallen angels taking Noah's side against a mass of doomed humanity and coming off as bloodthirsty Ents in the process, and Tubal-cain looking like he could've walked to the Biblical Nod from its borderlands in Hyboria.

Or maybe Australia, circa Road Warrior.

It gives it some verve, no doubt.  The big Flood sequence is certainly rad in its own 2010s, blockbustery way.  But "weird" doesn't always mean "riveting filmmaking," and if it's nothing too special by design, I also don't know if it was even necessary.  But, by God, it's surely what Aronofsky wanted, and I guess he got it, and the sacrifice of the Nephilim leads to the kewlest shot of the whole movie, a glorious pull-out to the whole wide world covered by cyclonic storms, so I'm certainly not about to start complaining about it.

Still, he didn't get everything he wanted: the environmentalist message embedded into the premise, and brought out somewhat in Aronofsky's telling, doesn't land with any great impact for anybody who wasn't already primed to appreciate (or despise) that message; I'm still a little bit angry at the betrayal represented by the opening expositionary title card that falsely promises an "industrial civilization" of Cainites (now that would have been weird).  Noah does nothing but give them ironworking, and that's ahistorical as shit, sure (there's also some brand of fantasy pyrotechnic material)but even with the utmost lack of care, nothing the Cainites have accomplished seems that plausible as a source of environmental devastation.  Thus the eco-friendliness of Noah slides right off the deck, which is something of a shame.

But then, the heart of Noah remains always in its lead's great religious dilemma, not in any contemporaneous "relevance," and never, ever is this more true than in the centerpiece cinematic triumph of this film, when Aronofsky fully lets his freak flag fly, stopping his movie cold to tell the story of Creation.  It is Noah's struggle in two minutes, if that: a timelapse marvel that tethers religion to evolution and intensifies its spiritual importance in the process, underlining what "seven days" must mean in the cosmic context of a God; but the story of Creation is not complete until it climaxes in the Fall, and what became of God's ultimate creation, after that.  And that is the story of man, a history of a violent epoch told in seconds, in devastating montage, delivered with unapologetic anachronism and heady symbolism, a reminder that all of us are descendants of Cain.  It's fantastic filmmaking, not just worthy of Aronofsky's talents, but maybe the single best thing he's ever done with pure imagery.

But it's not just a filmmaking indulgence.  That story is the reason why Noah is driven to such excess; by the same token, it's the reason why it's so obvious, now, what Noah's biggest problem is.  After the Flood, life goes on—as we know, since we're here to watch itbut there is a deep and horrifying question that settles upon the patriarch, as he drinks himself half to death in the aftermath.  It's only right in the very final frames that Aronofsky at last overreaches, in that awful smile of God, lighting up the sky in prismatic color.  In a moment, he destroys the ambiguity that has driven his film.  Noah is, in the broadest sense, about the enormity of the task of explaining God's ways to man; it suggests that, given the limitations of His flawed creations, even God Himself can't really do it, and thus no mere motion picture was ever going to manage the job.   Noah seemed to realize, therefore, that whatever fascination it could offer rested not in any pat answers, but only in the questions themselves.  Above all, the question that's eating at Noah now: namely, whether he did frustrate God's design.  But then again, how can you frustrate God?

The ambiguity lingers, even so.  Noah does have great power in it; I am astonished and ashamed that I claimed three years ago that it did not wrestle with the problems of divine morality, when (disregarding the parts where stuntmen get batted through the air by the Excalbians from Star Trek) that's literally all this movie does.  Nevertheless, I'm happy to have come around.  I'm even happier that Aronofsky, at least this one time, got to make a movie that's so much his ownand with so much of somebody else's money.

Score: 7/10 (however, if you're less bothered by the Bible showing up at the end of your Bible movies than I am, and I appear to be quite irrationally bothered by it indeed, 8/10, no doubt)

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