Fire consumes all. Water cleanses. It separates the foul from the pure. The wicked from the innocent. And that which sinks from that which rises. He destroys all, but only to start again.
My last movie review may not have tipped you off, but maybe following it up with this one will. I’ve been kind of on one of my little projects (you know me and my projects) and this time its art inspired by the Book of Genesis. I’ll be posting reviews of movies, books, music, a little television . . . it’ll be fun. But for now, Noah. Of course, I had to go back and take a look at this Biblical epic by way of Aronofsky; it’s a movie I saw in the theaters back when it came out and I really loved it at the time. I hadn’t seen it since then, so I was curious to see what a revisit would bring. I’m thrilled to relay that I still love it just as much as I did back in 2014.
I know there are various criticisms of this movie, but I don’t really want to engage with them except backhandedly by talking about what I love about this movie, because I really do love it. I think it is bravura epic filmmaking as only Aronofsky would have done it. Including the extra-Biblical sources and filtering things through Aronofsky’s unique perspective have given us things like the Watchers, which I think work spectacularly well. Visually, the film is quite striking; there are visuals here that had remained in my mind almost exactly as they were in the film over the nearly ten years since I’d seen it. Noah’s vision of the animals swimming through the floodwaters is striking as are the images of the animals coming to the Ark. I particularly love the shot of all the snakes slithering out of the forest. And that Creation sequence, nearly three minutes of Noah telling the story of Creation to his family, is just breathtaking in every way.
The performances are really excellent as well. Russell Crowe is nothing short of brilliant as the troubled Noah. The film has given him struggles that aren’t depicted in ancient literature and expanded on some that are, but it’s all in service of a truly magnificent, layered and intense performance. Anthony Hopkins is also not phoning it in at all, giving a witty and sharp performance as Methusaleh. Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson & Logan Lerman are also all quite good. Back when I first saw the film, I wasn’t entirely sold on Ray Winstone’s performance as the villainous Tubal-Cain; and it’s certainly very broad. But I enjoyed it more this time. He’s not subtle, but he is scary.
And while there were plenty of people around to miss the point, I think the script is actually a really sharp and really moving exploration of justice vs. mercy, wrath and grace, despair and hope. It is a spiritually complicated film and it refuses to either sanitize the story to make it less disturbing to modern audiences or to utterly condemn the story as a story of an evil God destroying innocents. It has a complicated relationship to the story, the only one that’s really intellectually honest, and it refuses to either soften or condemn the Creator, but to seek, through the character of Noah, to understand Him as a complex figure. For all the visual beauty, one of my favorite shots of the film is a quiet shot of the sky as Noah gazes upwards, believing he has failed in his duty to end his own family line. The only sound is the wind and the water as the camera lingers on those gray clouds; it’s the sight that, from time immemorial, humanity has seen when they searched for God. So while a lot of religious people took offense at this or that detail, I found Noah to be ultimately a film with a sincere yearning for spiritual exploration and I really loved that. At the end of the day, Noah provides that epic, visually stunning adventure, but grounds it with compelling characters with real emotional and spiritual journeys. Prior to this movie coming out, I wouldn’t have anticipated anyone pulling off a modern Biblical epic this effectively and powerfully; I certainly wouldn’t have anticipated it being Darren Aronofsky. But Noah worked in 2014 and it works today. Will wonders never cease? 4 stars.
tl;dr – visually stunning and thoughtfully written Biblical epic is anchored by a powerhouse lead performance; combines epic sweep and scale with intensely emotional characters. 4 stars.