Review: Noah

An intense Russell Crowe plays the title character who believes ‘The Creator’ has sent him nightmarish visions of a catastrophic aquatic disaster, and sees it as his mission to build a giant ark and save two of every animal. But does this include ‘Man’? He receives help from rock creatures, supposedly fallen angels. Meanwhile, in direct opposition to Noah and all things ‘Created’ it seems, is Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) a fierce warrior who just plain doesn’t like the cut of Noah’s jib (He also killed Noah’s father way back when), and tries to turn Noah’s son Ham (Logan Lerman) against him. Jennifer Connelly and Emma Watson play Noah’s wife Naameh and Ila, an adopted (and supposedly barren) girl, who both start to think Noah’s getting all moody and OCD on this whole Ark-building/prophecy deal. Sir Anthony Hopkins babbles on around the edges as Noah’s berry-loving grandfather Methuselah.

 

With an apparent non-believer (or at the very least non-practising Jew) at the helm in co-writer/director Darren Aronofsky (“The Wrestler”, “Black Swan”), I had hoped this 2014 film would be more “The Ten Commandments” than “The Passion of the Christ”. I mean, surely no real people of faith believe that the story of Noah’s Ark was literal truth, right? (Otherwise we’d need to get into the debate on whether dinosaurs were on the Ark or not, and when you reach that point it all gets a bit silly, don’t you think?) Unfortunately, one look at the completely out-of-place ‘rock angels’ here and you can’t help but roll your eyes at the alternative we’ve been given. The bloody things even talk! No, Aronofsky hasn’t given us “The Passion”, in fact the film’s best moments are actually the more sombre, darker moments that are more akin to “The Passion”. How’s that for irony? But overall, this has been taken too far into fantasy land for something I’m not a believer in to begin with. Worse than that, it’s dopey fantasy. Very, very dopey. It seems more akin to Ray Harryhausen (“Jason and the Argonauts”) than Cecil B. De Mille, perhaps. It’s an uneven mess that mixes the interesting with the absurd and with the boring.

 

Co-written by Ari Handel (the director’s former college roommate), it won’t please believers too much and I think it’s just too goofy and uneven for the rest of us to buy, either. I thought at the very least Aronofsky would have a clear vision here, but he can’t decide whether he wants to take this seriously or not, and creates a lumpy whole. Although completely silly, the first scene ends up being its own kind of brilliant stupidity in spite of itself. I’m talking about the opening scene being the biggest fantasy movie cliché of all: The son watching his father die at the hands of an evil bastard. I mean, that shit’s right out of both “The Beastmaster” and “Conan the Barbarian” for cryin’ out loud. Funny stuff, but hardly likely to have been intended as such. I’m still mystified as to how Marton Csokas (as Noah’s poor ‘ol dad) manages to maintain employment given he has never once given a performance of any distinction one way or the other.

 

Perhaps the film’s finest asset is Russell Crowe in the lead role. I’ll never get over the appalling “Virtuosity” and “The Quick and the Dead”, and hindsight has shown that Crowe’s turn in “A Beautiful Mind” was overly mannered and wildly overpraised. His revisionist “Robin Hood”…yeah, let’s not even go there. However, when Crowe is on target, he can be a very powerful or at least persuasive, charismatic actor. Unlike his quasi-Scottish in “Robin Hood” that sounded nothing like the English accent he claimed to be aiming for there, Rusty doesn’t even bother to put on an accent for this one. I think that’s for the best. He gives a serious-minded, anguished and overall solid performance. I commend him for treating this material seriously and not condescending to it or going for hammy histrionics. Meanwhile, as much as I love Ray Winstone being his usual Ray Winstone self, his best moments in this film are when he’s just being quietly creepy and insidious. It’s amazing, though, how much more sense his supposedly villainous character makes than the supposed hero, Noah. Noah really is wrong in his thinking in this film, noble as his motives are, whereas Winstone’s Tubal-Cain is correct in his thinking, but evil in his intentions/motives. It’s interesting, actually. It’s a shame then, that Winstone’s rock solid performance is tempered somewhat by the fact that his character is basically on the wrong side of…everything, really, even though as I said, I actually felt he made a lot more sense than he was clearly supposed to.

 

The rest of the cast, however are a fair bit underwhelming. I’m not sure what the hell Sir Anthony Hopkins’ odd performance is all about, really. At times I felt like he was meant to be Gollum, with his ‘precious’ being berries. There’s one scene where the resemblance is uncanny. It’s just a very, very strange performance that doesn’t really aid the film at all. Logan Lerman gives a performance that seems to suggest that he realises what I was thinking: His character isn’t so much conflicted as confusing. His motivation/conflict isn’t well-written at all, and as a result the actor looks lost. Of all the characters on display here as written, his seems the least likely and least entitled to be conflicted about Noah. I just didn’t get it. The women probably fare worst of all, with Oscar-winner (and at one point, the imaginary love of my life) Jennifer Connelly having an almost entirely passive, reactionary role. She’s just ‘The Wife’. It’s the perfect example of a Female Lead being a Supporting Role, and it’s beneath her talents. For her part, Emma Watson plays an interesting role in the least interesting fashion possible.

 

I think it’s pretty brave of Aronofsky to paint Noah in a fairly dark light. It’s an extremely sensitive subject/text for a whole lot of people. Having said that, I bet Mel Gibson loved everything in this movie except maybe the rock monsters. The most interesting thing in this entire film is Noah’s firmly held belief that man has fucked up and deserves to die out. I have no idea if this is expressed at all in the bible (outside of the Garden of Eden story of course), but it sure is interesting and frankly didn’t seem much more harsh than the thinking that went into the whole Adam & Eve deal. I never understood that one, mortality for all future generations seems like far too harsh punishment to me. Fuck you, though, Adam and Eve. Nice one, you selfish pricks on that whole apple thing.

 

The other thing worth praising in this film is its look. It looks incredible, and I didn’t mind the MTV-style editing and time-lapse photography, it actually fit in here, pretentious or not. So kudos to Aronofsky and usual cinematographer Matthew Libatique (“Requiem for a Dream”, “Black Swan”) on that. Demerits, however, for some really lousy CGI I must say. It’s not just the dopey rock angels (though they certainly look mediocre), all of the CGI creatures in the film look dopey and seem out of place. They give a cheesy “Clash of the Titans” vibe in a film that also mixes in brooding intensity and inner turmoil. At times the FX are so bad they gave me bad flashbacks to Stephen Sommers’ awful “The Mummy”. Take the CGI creatures out and you have a better, but still flawed film.

 

Fantastic to look at, and Russell Crowe is ideal in the lead, but this film is all over the shop. It never settles on a tone, and the goofy parts (embellishments to a story that seems plenty goofy enough to those without ‘faith’) just don’t gel with the darker, more intense parts. The cinematography is too good (excellent, really) for this to be a bad film, but by not deciding on just what he wanted this film to be, Aronofsky likely leaves no one satisfied.

 

Rating: C+