Noah (2014)

Perhaps the weirdest combination of director and biblical storyline since Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger then Life) directed King of Kings in the early 1960's. Director Darren Aronofsky is best known for such dark, obsessive, even sexual films as The Fountain, The Wrestler, and Black Swan, and while for me his films don't always work, I at least know they are going to be interesting, and that was what I was expecting from Aronofsky's Noah, an interesting failure, but it turned out to be surprisingly good. In fact I'd go so far as to say that Noah is one of the better Biblical epics ever made, and that success is due in large part to the same thing that drove the success of Ray's King of Kings, an outsiders ethos and not being too married to the text. Aronofsky is very much not married to the text in a way that could be quite frustrating to those Christian audience members expecting to see a faithful rendering of the age old story, in board outline you have that here, but the director makes a lot of side trips and digressions, and even gives the story a different moral, an ecological one. To me there is nothing wrong with this because the director is dealing with mythos, a flexible thing which needs to change some to meet the needs of the time in which the story is being told, not a ridged inerrant Bible story for fundamentalists.

The story of Noah is in fact probably my least favorite Bible story, its pretty morally disgusting and Aronofsky doesn't shy away form this aspect of the tale, his Noah's (played by an earthy Russell Crowe) is a difficult, obsessive and often unlikable fellow (as any Aronofsky protagonist should be) but in comparison to the wider pre-apocalyptic world he inhabits, mostly better then the alternative, i.e. Ray Winstone's evil king Tubal-cain. The ash gray world of the film and its small noble band struggling against the digressed remnants of humanity around them reminded me a lot of the film version of The Road, ironically this biblical pictures closest cousin. The story here is dark, depressing, and often defeatist, but has moments of an ambiguous hope. Jennifer Connelly still has that chemistry with Crowe she memorably had in A Beautiful Mind nearly a decade and a half ago, Emma Watson's cute, and Anthony Hopkins has a great, hammy, almost cameo part as Methuselah. A really different take on the old story that for me reinvigorated it, a worthy experiment and one of the strangest big budget movies I've ever seen. ***1/2