(The following content is reran from the 2018 Christmas marathon on Letterboxd, as originally seen here.)
Why were there so many Christian films in 2014? In part, because Darren Aronofsky's fifteen year struggle to bring his vision of the Biblical Flood to the big screen finally bore fruit. A director whose work frequently involves characters pushing themselves to radical extremes, Aronofsky makes an interesting helm for the story of Noah, the patriarch who left all mankind to die beneath God's raging seas to preserve the sanctity of Creation. It's both a reversal and embrace of his usual ideas about the self and the masses, and it all comes packaged with a massive budget and expectations for big returns, courtesy of his success with The Wrestler and Black Swan. As the film proved a success critically and financially, and comes from the mind of a director with actual artistic ambitions, the only "did this movie need to exist" joke I can think to make involves slinging mud at mother! for trying a move into entirely symbolic territory and losing some of the power.
Aronofsky finds a far more even balance between metaphor and narrative this time around. Several passages of Noah creep into pure visual storytelling, and not just those involving the voice of God penetrating Noah's thoughts as a rapid series of powerful images. The reinterpretation of Watchers as victims of God's wrath and eventual precursors to the New Testament style of forgiveness-based salvation also lends way to interesting creature design and bits of worldbuilding to create a unique yet still Biblically-grounded setting. Noah's retelling of Genesis' opening passages through a flashing look at the Big Bang, planetary formation, and evolution that gives way to the key images of the Eden story helps underscore his character of a highly principled man trying to interpret his Creator's will through preset personal beliefs - a man who holds all he sees as dear, intruded upon by the sin of simply living, commanded to oversee its destruction. And then you have the contrast between a manmade apocalypse of fire, Enoch's vision in a time when the descendants of Cain ruled the land, and Noah's prophecy of devastation by water. Both presented as horrifying, especially when we see the survivors attempting to drown out the screams of thousands left to suffer and die on the mountaintops, but only one carries the divine promise of something after.
Compared to mother!, the metaphors at play here have a far clearer purpose, and relate more directly to characters who register as actual people. I've seen much critique of the decision to cast Noah as a figure who would murder his own grandchildren to ensure humanity's extinction, but I think it works very well within the film's parameters and Biblical cnaon. All the really hard parts leading up to the flood - interpreting his visions, constructing the ark, gathering the animals, defending it against invaders - are presented as grand undertakings, yet comparatively nothing compared to squatting in the dark for months on end with the knowledge of his supposed duty. In a twist on the usual Judeo-Christian narrative of prophets and chosen men passing God's tests by proving themselves willing to enact his will no matter the cost, Noah comes through this period in which nobody can dissuade him from the ultimate evil by looking into the face of a newborn child, and showing mercy. For once, the Creator wants to see his progeny spare a life, set aside the grim determination necessary to watch the whole world die, and mark the beginning of a new era with compassion rather than the murderous rage of Cain. Taking this route gives us Noah as a miracle worker and a mere man, prone to false beliefs and internal conflict as much as any other - a far stronger character than Jennifer Lawrence's being totally subsumed into her role as God's power of creation and destruction.
Other characters make for somewhat compelling cases, though unfortunately most suffer the opposite problem as mother!'s cast, and become mere pieces in the narrative. Ham's secretive relationship with Tubalcain aboard the ark has some interesting aspects of temptation and the sin of arrogance, which makes for a good extension of the earlier corruption of a "we make our own destiny" mindset. I'm also rather a fan of Og and the other Watchers, and their brief journey from distrustful, bitter souls to sacrificing warriors. Looking at the rest of Noah's family, though, they seem a little empty, and don't make much of an impact on the story. For all of Aronofsky's subtextual challenging of Noah's inherent righteousness as a patriarch, he doesn't really afford wife Naamah or adoptive daughter Ila a chance to interrogate his beliefs before the flood, or play a part in his turn to peace afterwards. They scream and cry to no avail with all the passion of archetypes and none of the unique embodying aspects of individual characters, and ultimately weaken the notion of the necessity of a balance between total fealty to the Creator and blazing one's own trail. Consequently, Tubalcain's temptations seem more unexamined and obviously evil, rendering him a conventional arrogant bad guy in the middle of a narrative calling for something more nuanced.
There's other things I could complain about, like how unnaturally well-groomed Shem and Ila look compared to the grimy naturalist aesthetic of their family, or the grand scope of the special effects straining against even a liberal $125 million budget and making some of the more "epic" scenes look awkward, but I think I've gotten the bulk of my analysis and valid critiques on paper. Aronofsky definitely does better work when he has something concrete and human to come back to rather than the excess of a pure passion project. While Noah is very much a personal story for him, the demands of a film designed as a blockbuster keep him focused on attaching his keen eye for visual symbolism and intense editing to a story about actual people. He didn't produce a masterstroke thanks to the neglect of other characters and the unfortunate shortstop of ideas right before pushing them to something truly complex and layered, but he did make possibly the best Bible movie of the lot for this project. I'm beyond glad we have a creator who wants to consider the Bible as sacred text AND inspiration for their own thumbprint. A whole seven films of blind lionization in a single month might drive me mad, so I'll gladly take intriguing and beautiful yet somewhat stilted.
Anyways, next time we're exploiting a child's close shave with death. That'll be fun.
3.5/5
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