Noah, Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious reimagining of the Biblical story of Noah and the flood, is already so fraught with controversy and conflict that rendering any judgment on it is tantamount to taking a side in the culture wars. The film sits in the uncomfortable position of being the first genuine attempt by a major Hollywood studio to recreate the Biblical blockbuster days of the 1950s and early ’60s, in which the Good Book provided plentitudes of narrative material for widescreen epics filled with pageantry, special effects, and casts of thousands. And, while Aronofsky, the rigorous auteur behind nerve-rattling psychodramas like Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Wrestler (2008), and Black Swan (2011), is going for something more challenging and profound and nervy than the Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era Biblical spectaculars, the basic impulse is still the same: to marshal the vast armies of the cinematic arts to bring the grandest possible visual life to familiar stories.

Aronofsky and coscreenwriter Ari Handel, who produced his last four features and cowrote one of them (2006’s The Fountain), have taken the bold approach of expanding quite prominently on the Biblical text by giving prominent roles and dramatic arcs to marginal characters (such as Tubal-Cain) and vague passages (particularly Genesis 6:4, which mentions the Nephilim, giants that some interpret as fallen angels who procreated with mortal women). Although they have been accused in many sectors of making up things that have no basis in Scripture, Aronofksy and Handel have been quite explicit in invoking the Jewish tradition of midrash, in which Biblical stories are retold and expanded to fill in the narrative gaps. Thus, the more unfamiliar elements of Noah, both dramatic situations and characters that will feel out of sorts with traditional Sunday School lessons, nevertheless play directly into the film’s themes about the profundity of justice tempered with mercy.

Russell Crowe is aptly cast as Noah, one of the last descendants of the lineage of Seth. Noah and his family live as nomads on the outskirts of the highly developed antediluvian cities built by the descendants of Seth’s sibling Cain, who famously committed the world’s first murder by killing his brother Abel. Noah, his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), and their sons Ham (Logan Lerman) and Shem (Logan Lerman) are joined by a girl, Ila (Emma Watson), who they rescue after her entire family has been slaughtered. When Noah begins having visionary dreams about an apocalyptic event in which the world and everything in it is destroyed by water, he visits his grandfather, the ancient Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), who confirms that God is speaking to him and that he must follow God’s will by building an enormous ark that will be a safe haven for his family and two of “every living creature” once the waters are unleashed.

Noah is, true to its intentions, nothing if not a visually stunning work. Aronofsky’s command of the film’s visuals is consistently impressive, from the old-fashioned grandeur of seeing every kind of animal arriving at the ark in pairs, to the striking Day-Glo vision of the pre-Fall world that follows a montage of Creation told directly from the opening passages of Genesis. The film’s most striking imagery is undoubtedly Noah’s two visions, which convey without dialogue the essence of the world’s destruction and its potential salvation. They are indelibly creepy and poetic at the same time. Yet, the film’s rough-hewn, primitive beauty is already being pushed aside in favor of arguments about its fidelity to its Biblical source, particularly two main elaborations that some have found quite jarring and inexplicable.

The film’s first and most jarring elaboration on the Old Testament account is the introduction of a group of fallen angels known as Watchers, who the film explains descended to Earth to help mankind, but were eventually rejected, hunted, and mostly killed by those they sought to help. In addition, as punishment by God for leaving heaven against His will, the Watchers have been transformed into enormous rocklike creatures that look like stony versions of the Ents in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). While the Watchers play an important narrative role in the film, aiding Noah and his family in the construction of the ark, their actions play an even more crucial thematic role, in that their eventual redemption is tied explicitly to the redemption of humanity as an expression of God’s mercy, a quality that is not often associated with the Old Testament and its frequent evocations of fire and brimstone.

The other jarring, but dramatically central, change involves the character of Noah himself, whose sense of righteousness is not as neat and clean as some might like, especially when he comes to the conclusion that God’s will is for all of humanity to die, including him and his family. This leads to a dramatic arc in which Noah, intent on ensuring that humanity will not continue after their eventual deaths, threatens to kill the soon-to-be born child of Shem and Ila if it is a girl. The savagery of this act is undeniable, but Crowe conveys it quite powerfully as an extension of Noah’s righteousness and willingness to do whatever he believes is the will of God. The fact that he misunderstands God’s will is perhaps a good explanation for why some fundamentalists are so leery of the film, since it suggests that the will of God is not something that can be easily understood and, even more unsettling, can be misunderstood. In short, no one person has all the answers.

Aronofsky depicts Noah as a man of the earth who respects God’s creation and admonishes his children not to use more natural resources than they need, which contrasts sharply with the rest of humanity, whose “wickedness” is embodied in their war-mongering violence and decimation of the landscape, most of which has been reduced to a blackened desert of tree stumps and emptiness. Aronofsky’s vision of Biblical wickedness is expressed specifically through the character of Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), who has declared himself king and leads armies to enforce his will. Whereas Noah and his family are associated with a primitivism connected to creation, Tubal-cain’s primitivism is forged of iron and bloodshed, and some of the film’s most disturbing sequences depict the savagery with which he and the rest of humanity survive in a world they have all but destroyed.

Those who are bothered by the film’s artistic license are not seeing the forest for the trees, as Noah conveys what can only be described as a genuinely moving message about the complex relationship between humanity and God (who is here referred to as “The Creator,” but is clearly the Biblical Jehovah). In their zeal to show why the film is misguided, its critics are already misrepresenting it (I’ve read too many accounts of how Noah turns into a psychopath who wants to kill his entire family, which is just flat-out wrong), just as critics of a similar stripe jumped all over Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which similarly diverged from Biblical fidelity as an unconventional means of conveying a profound theological insight. Arguments against the film tend to ignore the inherent necessity of change when adapting a story from one medium to another—accentuated by the movement from an ancient text originally passed down in oral tradition to a modern-day cinematic vernacular. It also conveniently ignores the long history of elaborating on Biblical stories when putting them on the big screen. Even the great Cecil B. DeMille in his sacrosanct Christ epic The King of Kings (1927) saw fit to diverge from his otherwise relentless fidelity to the Gospels by creating wholesale an opening prologue that envisions Mary Magdalene as a wealthy harlot overseeing an exotic harem filled with live animals, filmed in two-strip Technicolor, no less. Aronofsky’s film may not be perfect, but criticizing it for not sticking directly to the source material unnecessarily obscures what it does so well, which is bring to life the conflicts of an ancient world that still have much to tell us today.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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