I've always sort of though of Noah (2014) as the exception in Darren Aronofsky's career, the film you can't quite account for, except that's not really right for two reasons:
1) I don't think it's really possible to pin down what makes a Darren Aronofsky film. The two films I'm not rewatching for this series, because I already rewatched them in the past two years for other reasons, are The Fountain and The Wrestler, and I don't think two films could be more different from one another. And those are two consecutive films in his filmography.
2) The familiar ingredients you can identify in Aronofsky's films are certainly present in Noah.
That might be even more the case now that I've seen mother! -- not once, not twice, but three times, with a fourth coming in October for this series. Famously, you can interpret mother! multiple ways. Some people think it's a metaphor for the artist's creative process. Some people think it's an environmental parable. And then of course, most obviously -- to me, anyway -- it is a representation of The Bible, or at least certain parts of it anyway.
It strikes me that if Aronofsky was frustrated by the end product of Noah, probably his least acclaimed film, it might have been because it was just too literal. Biblical epics tend to be so. I don't have any evidence that Aronofsky does think this, but mother! is a good indication that he yearned to be more inscrutable than a fairly straightforward retelling of a Bible story allows you to be.
Some of what we see in mother!, though, has its origins right there in Noah. (And these two are also consecutive films, which makes more sense than The Fountain and The Wrestler.) In the scene where Russell Crowe's title character goes to the city to find wives for his sons, and is so horrified by the exact level of misery and degradation and moral pestilence that exists there, he sees an innocent lamb raised high by the teeming masses, who proceed to tear it to pieces. That same thing happens -- mostly off screen, thankfully -- to an infant in mother!
Destruction and rebirth is a big theme in mother!, and naturally that's also a big part of any story involving the flood that destroyed all land-based creatures on earth except for two of each.
(Now what will I have to discuss two months from now, when I actually watch mother!?)
But you can also look back to Aronofsky's earlier efforts when you watch Noah. The original sin montage -- snake, apple, Cain killing Abel -- is basically his updated version of the drug-taking montage in Requiem for a Dream. Plus, you can't see the flowering garden of Eden and not thinking of the tree of life in The Fountain.
So while I do think this fits in Aronofsky's career better than I once did, I'm not sure if I like it all that much better.
I was thinking that this movie basically has three visual modes, only one of which I actually like. I'll go with that one first:
1) Trippy conceptual shit. The aforementioned original sin montage fits into that, as does the conception of Adam and Eve as glowing white figures in the conclusion of Noah's story to his family about creation. The fast-growing flower is part of that as well. All this stuff works and it has an enviable crispness.
2) Digital effects. The arrival of the animals, and of course, the giant rock creatures that help Noah build the arc. I guess they're fallen angels turned into protectors? Right, they call them Watchers (just looked it up). I'm not sure if this is actually from The Bible (probably), but it reminded me of something that should have been in a Lord of the Rings movie ... but wouldn't have been great there either.
3) Drab scenes of humans glumly fighting and arguing with each other.
I'm not sure if it would have been possible to see through the first visual scheme all the way. But the digital effects -- which are fine, but suffer from the same essential problems as most digital effects -- and the people playing dress-up in a Bible epic don't serve the part of the movie that I think most had Aronofsky's heart in it.
Not as a complaint about this film in particular, but I also found myself asking all sorts of questions about the logistics of this whole Bible story, such as:
1) How are the descendants of Cain so plentiful yet the descendants of Seth so few? I get the basic premise that the Cain descendants sinfully spread their seed and multiplied beyond any sense of what God would have found decent -- kind of how the dumb people flourish in Idiocracy due to their unrestrained baby-making, while the prudent smart people die off due to their desire to wait until "the perfect time" to have kids. But are the Seth descendants so prudish that there is literally only one family of them remaining -- after ten generations? And if that's not a correct reading, and there are other Seth descendants around, what's God's explanation for wantonly killing them off in the flood as well?
2) And speaking of people God wantonly kills off, if the animals are innocent, how come he doesn't save all the animals? He keeps the minimum sample necessary for procreation of all species, including humans, regardless of whether they are saintly or sinful. It seems like a rather cruel treatment of the innocent ones, but perhaps more importantly, it represents no distinction made between humans and animals -- even though the humans are the ones he wants to purge. I guess God's hatred for humans was so great that sacrificing 99.9% of the earth's land-based animals was worth killing 99.9% of its humans.
3) I also found myself wondering how much of this is Aronofsky's interpretation of The Bible and how much is actually in there. Not wondering enough about it to look it up, apparently, but I did wonder: Was there really a Cain stowaway on the ark who tried to turn one of Noah's son's against him? Did Noah really plan to have humans die out because that was his interpretation of what God was doing, even if it meant killing his own granddaughters because they had wombs? (Beware religious fundamentalists, then as now.) If Noah's sons didn't have wives -- except for the suddenly not barren one played by Emma Watson -- how was there supposed to be enough biological diversity to prevent extreme forms of mental and physical deformity resulting from incest? When Watson gives birth to twin girls -- meaning each one can be a wife to Noah's two other sons -- is that any way to build a society full of healthy offspring? To say nothing of it being really icky to have to marry your nieces.
It strikes me that God should have picked about four Noahs and had them make about four arcs and then had them all meet up to repopulate the earth with babies that didn't have a third ear growing out of their foreheads.
Let's end on a positive note.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie was still one of my favorite scenes, and it's really just a throwaway. When the flood waters have risen above people's ability to survive them -- conveniently, with blasts of water gushing from the earth, which is probably more dramatic and narratively efficient than weeks of unending rain -- earth's final survivors all cling, screaming, to what must be the only remaining crags of dry land, which would also be the world's highest mountains. (Did Mt. Everest exist in Biblical times?) The image of the ark floating mercilessly in the background as these little specks of people scrabble for purchase and emit their blood-curdling despair is something that really stuck with me in 2014, and still does.
I knew I had written about this already on The Audient, and only after writing the above did I go back to read that post from 2014. It's funny how little the things I thought were worth highlighting about the movie have changed in the nine years since I first saw it. You can read that post here if you are really curious and if this is not already enough coverage of one of Darren Aronofsky's lesser films.
Alright, I previewed it already -- in October I watch mother!, for the fourth time (but first in about four years).
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