A cinematic rule of thumb: beware the dream project. The movies that a director has been toting in his back pocket for decades, waiting for the moment to be ripe and the opportunity to present itself, have “white elephant” written all over them. That was my fear when, after the greatly deserved success of “Black Swan,” from 2010, Darren Aronofsky announced his plan to make a grand-scale, big-budget version of the story of Noah, which had been an obsession of his since he was thirteen (he’s now forty-five).
But the adolescent spark behind “Noah,” (which Tad Friend discusses in his Profile of Aronofsky in the magazine), far from being an obstacle or a pitfall, is central to its virtues. The movie grows from a sense of wonder inspired by the contemplation of Biblical grandeur, the recognition that there was a world in which divine and human things seemed to be integrated. Giants walked the earth and humans were often endowed with impossible powers. God intervened in daily affairs with an alacrity and an efficacy that mayors would envy, and he spoke to people loud and clear from his verified account.
The story of Noah is, first of all, a near-apocalypse in which God kills off almost everybody, and the terrifying scale of divine wrath, along with the awesome burden of the few remaining people who confront it, must have had a shattering effect on the young Aronofsky. That vision of enormity—of divinity as monstrosity—comes through in the movie. And what about the holy man who is totally devoted to that God, and who actually hears the command of that God? The power of “Noah” arises from Aronofsky’s shuddering comprehension that the person who thinks he’s in touch with God is capable of anything. The movie stands on its head the Dostoyevskian dictum “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” In “Noah,” the notion of God’s existence renders the natural order frenetically, jinglingly, miraculously disorderly, and it grants a true believer a free pass for whatever atrocity he believes he’s commanded to enact. Remarkably, in the movie’s crucial drama—Noah’s intention to end the human race by killing the offspring of his son Shem (Douglas Booth) and his daughter-in-law Ila (Emma Watson)—Aronofsky grafts onto the tale of Noah one of the most harrowing and morally troubling Biblical stories, Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It seems as if that tale in particular had been troubling Aronofsky since childhood, too.
What has been widely cited as the “environmentalist” orientation of Aronofsky’s version of the Noah story (which he co-wrote with his longtime friend Ari Handel) is more like a Christianized nightmare of an Old Testament enormity come to life. The movie pivots on the notion of original sin, not a Jewish idea but, rather, a Christian one, which in Aronofsky’s imagination is established back to the primordial days of Yahwistic world-making. If the fathers of the Hebrew Bible imagined the Fall as a blight on the species at large and as a curse on human nature but had only the wrathful God of the Hebrew Bible to listen to, how could they justify their own existence and exertions? What right did Noah have to perpetuate his own line and his own species in the face of his own recognition of unworthiness?
I’m reminded of another Jewish kid who leveraged an outsider’s knowledge of Christian lore into a radical twist on tradition: the thirteen-year-old Ozzie from the twenty-three-year-old Philip Roth’s story “The Conversion of the Jews.” (It’s in the book “Goodbye, Columbus.”) For those who haven’t read it, it’s too delicious to give away. But, over-all, Roth’s young epikores airs an intellectually skeptical and gleefully ribald objection to a defining Jewish tenet in order to show up the dullness, blandness, and incuriosity of the elders. The child—and the author—offer a vast guffaw of reason against the harshness of authority and the illegitimate demands of orthodoxy.
Roth offers his own tweak—a riotous one—on Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. It reminds me that, after a Rosh Hashanah service where the rabbi’s sermon addressed that story, my pious but non-observant mother said, “If God told me to sacrifice my son, I’d have said, ‘No! Are you crazy?’ ” She was a good mother but not, from the ancient perspective, a good Jew—a notion that’s packed into Roth’s story. (The writer David Grossman, in George Packer’s 2010 Profile of him in the magazine, makes a similar observation.) Roth’s concluding flourish evokes a liberal humanism that both arises from modern American Judaism and blurs its tenets. Similarly, the dramatic climax of “Noah,” in which family love and moral instincts justify the ways of man to God, suggests the first draft of a New Testament—albeit one that Jews could live with, too.
Aronofsky, however, is no sentimentalist. His vision of a humane religion is one that’s achieved through the trials of a fierce, hardened, rigid man who has to wrestle with the vengeful and unyielding God within himself. Although the ostensible ecological passion that runs through the film may appeal to the left side of the political spectrum, Aronofsky’s depiction of a righteous believer who takes the first step in setting aside judgment in favor of tolerance is a lesson pointedly aimed at the conservative faithful—the audience for whom a Bible movie would be ticket-bait in the first place.
Aronofsky’s images, including his mercurial special effects, as well as the glowering, red-hot performance by Russell Crowe, do justice to this distinctive vision of struggle with iron-willed faith. But the movie’s visionary eccentricity is undercut, tamed, normalized by one unfortunate element: the bewilderingly bombastic music, which seems to be the director’s concession to the norms of a studio action film. Had Aronofsky followed Stanley Kubrick’s lead from “2001” and repudiated a score in favor of music to match the inner grandeur of his conception (which, to me, evokes Mahler and Schoenberg), he’d have emphasized the idiosyncratic power of his own big idea. Though, had he done so, he might also have had more trouble getting the movie to attract the wide national audience for which it’s intended.
Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures
