Peter Bradshaw 

Noah review – ‘A big, muscular movie’

Darren Aronofsky's roaring biblical action-adventure is buoyed by Russell Crowe's mighty Noah, but some of the story's simplicity is swept away, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  


That awful downpour prophesied by everyone from King Lear to Travis Bickle is the subject of Darren Aronofsky's Noah, the Bible story of the great flood and humanity's survival, redemption, and the new covenant with God. It's a big, muscular movie with a big, muscular performance from Russell Crowe as the mighty, bearded Noah. No other actor is conceivable in the role, now that Kirk Douglas is out of the running.

Noah is an ambitious piece of work, set initially in a scorched, desolate world, both antediluvian and post-apocalyptic. There are some bold and ingenious script inventions and "origin myth" riffs: a startling new Abrahamic slant on what Noah intends for humanity after the floodwaters have receded, and a clever and persuasive psychological explanation for his legendary drunkenness and shame. The covenant itself is abolished, apart from some dreamy visions of rainbows, and the instructions about meat-eating have been reversed into vegetarianism. Other novelties include a detachable escape-pod on the ark, a feature that Noah may well have regretted building. For all this, the film is sometimes bombastic and redundant, and subtly disappointing.

It suffers from a rhetorical uncertainty, unsure if or how to modernise its interpretative possibilities for a secular audience, and unsure how far to go against the grain of traditional narrative. Just as humanity is divided into the righteous and the unrighteous (the rain falling on both), so this movie divides into visionary and less-visionary parts, though its visionariness is far from what has been promised. There is a flashback sequence, already much talked about, which depicts the creation and the fall using Aronofsky's distinctive strobo-time-lapse technique. Commentators have compared it to The Tree of Life, but it's nowhere near as extravagant, freaky and crazy as Terrence Malick; not as potent as the comparably trippy sequences in Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, and in any case soon gives way to tamer, conservative storytelling.

Crowe's Noah is an ascetic and a wise man, a survivor, protecting his family like the grizzled father in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. He is the great inheritor of a noble line, son of Lamech (Marton Csokas) and grandson of Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins); he is married to dignified, drawn Naameh, played by Jennifer Connelly. His sons are Ham (Logan Lerman), Shem (Douglas Booth) and Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll). Shem is to take a wife in the form of Ila (Emma Watson), an invention of Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel that is to be of central importance. Mankind's great father appears to Noah in an enigmatic dream whose vivid images resonate with Noah's earlier waking experience of a drop of rain emerging from the clear blue sky and seeding a miraculous white flower. The creator wishes to wipe out degenerate mankind with a flood, but Noah and his family are to be spared, and entrusted with the task of rescuing breeding-pairs of every animal species in an ark.

It all happens in a very Tolkienian universe, with a race of silly rock giants called Watchers, theoretically fallen angels, but straight out of The Hobbit. Their purpose here is to solve the literalist question of how this ark is supposed to get built and how it is supposed to be defended from the rebellious hordes of the unchosen, led by Ray Winstone's wicked Tubal-cain.

Yet there is a larger issue: how to dramatise that very important supporting character who in the original has dialogue scenes with Noah: God. Inevitably, and understandably, there is no literal God here, simply haunted abstractions, and in this sense this film interestingly resembles Aronofsky's first movie, Pi. An actual character would have risked absurdity. But leaving him out, or transforming him into some pantheistically correct concept, is to flinch from the strange, stark mystery of the story itself; a story in which God speaks to humans on what is almost a level playing field. Here, Noah must absorb and ventriloquise God's word: Crowe is effectively playing both Noah and God as a frowning alpha-patriarch hybrid. To paraphrase Robert Burns, his is a world of gathering brows and a gathering storm. And undoubtedly Crowe does it well.

It is traditional when reviewing biblical movies to say that they are more exciting than in the "Sunday school" versions. That could be so, and this roaring fantasy action adventure is a world away from childhood pieties. Yet it's done away with some of the beauty, clarity and simplicity. Something has been lost in the storm.

 

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