Noah: Film Review
10:00 PM PDT 3/20/2014 by Todd McCarthy
The Bottom Line
Before Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore, there was Noah.
Opens
March 28 (Paramount)
Cast
Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth, Mark Margolis, Kevin Durand
Director
Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky wrestles one of scripture's most primal stories to the ground and extracts something vital and audacious, while also pushing some aggressive environmentalism, in Noah. Whereas for a century most Hollywood filmmakers have tread carefully and respectfully when tackling biblical topics in big-budget epics aimed at a mass audience, Aronofsky has been daring, digging deep to develop a bold interpretation of a tale which, in the original, offers a lot of room for speculation and invention. The narrative of the global flood that wiped out almost all earthly life is the original disaster story, one that's embraced by most of the major world religions, which means that conservative and literal-minded elements of all faiths who make it their business to be offended by untraditional renditions of holy texts will find plenty to fulminate about here. Already banned in some Middle Eastern countries, Noah will rile some for the complete omission of the name “God” from the dialogue, others for its numerous dramatic fabrications and still more for its heavy-handed ecological doomsday messages, which unmistakably mark it as a product of its time. But whether you buy these elements or not, this is still an arresting piece of filmmaking that has a shot at capturing a large international audience both for its fantasy-style spectacle and its fresh look at an elemental Bible story most often presented as a kiddie yarn.
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The director/co-writer serves notice of his revisionism right away, mutating the opening line of Genesis into, “In the beginning there was nothing.” In the Bible's ark story, God does most of the talking, whereas here, Noah does, at one point raging at the silent one he only calls the Creator, “Why do you not answer me?” This Noah, who receives his instructions about what to do from disturbing, quasi-hallucinatory visions, is presented as the last good man on Earth, the chosen one who will preserve the world's life forms along with his immediate family while the wicked will be swept away, forcing humanity to make a fresh start.
One of the striking things about the Noah tale is that it presents a fallible Creator, one who admits to disappointments over shortcomings in the product of the sixth day of creation with the remark, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” The exceptions are middle-aged Noah (Russell Crowe), his wife, Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), and sons Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham (Logan Lerman) and Japheth (Leo Carroll), who are estranged from the rest of humanity and live apart from it, struggling to survive in forbidding surroundings. Noah's physical and mental toughness is strengthened by an abiding faith, and Crowe's splendidly grounded work here recalls some of his finest earlier performances, notably in Gladiator, The Insider and Cinderella Man, in which he embodied values of tenacity, trustworthiness and resourcefulness that inspired confidence that his characters would do the right thing.
To be sure, this is not the genial, grandfatherly Noah charmingly evoked by John Huston when he led an orderly assemblage of animals into the ark two-by-two in his 1965 epic The Bible. Crowe's Noah is a fighter, a survivalist and yet a tortured man dismayed by the ruin brought upon the land by the others of his species. In a visit with his ancient grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), the men agree that, “It's men who broke the world,” and that, as a result, the Creator will destroy it. Foraging with one of his sons, Noah instructs, “We only collect what we need, what we can use.” For many today, this sort of environmental, back-to-the-earth religion has replaced the old-fashioned kind, with nonbelievers as shunned and disdained by the faithful as heathens once were by the righteous.
Working on by far his biggest budget in the wake of the great global success of Black Swan, Aronofsky bulks up his film not only with naturalistic spectacle but with fantastical elements that evoke both Ray Harryhausen and Peter Jackson; creatures rise up from the sea, a whole forest takes instantaneous shape at Noah's convenience and there is far more swordplay and fighting than one ever imagined in this story.
But by far the most startling apparition in this context are the Watchers, the so-called Nephilim, or fallen angels only glancingly mentioned in the Bible. Here they take the form of giant, ferocious-looking rock people (given great, gravelly voice by Nick Nolte, Mark Margolis and Frank Langella, no less) who not only come to Noah's aid by doing the heavy lifting in building the ark but cut down, stomp on and otherwise decimate the hordes who eventually besiege the ark in hopes of climbing aboard at the last minute.
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Original story found here:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/noah/review/689450
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