Noah

A matinee screening of "Noah", unfortunately, reminds me of Jesse Ventura's remark that organized religion is "the haven of weak minds." The midday audience was overwhelmingly elderly, crippled, and hard of hearing. The aisles were crowded with wheelchairs and there were many mentally retarded people in attendance. Cell-phones rang periodically during the show and the old folks chatted loudly about the picture, querulously posing inquiries to one another that the images and dialogue on the screen had either just answered or were about to answer. Characteristic of many Christians, the more pious members of the audience seem to have no acquaintance with the Bible at all and appear to derive their knowledge of the story of the great Flood from dimly remembered Sunday School programs taught by Junior High Girls at the end of the Depression or, perhaps, from coloring book images that they may have completed in Vacation Bible School if there was such a thing in 1944. Bladders are weak, of course, when you're old and a swollen prostate can apply unpleasant pressure and so the elderly men were constantly on the move, hiking back and forth unsteadily in front of the screen, tottering over seated people in the dark, the whole time guzzling from huge containers of soda pop. An ancient man behind me seemed to have no idea what was happening on the screen: when Noah (Russell Crowe) figures out how to cultivate grapes and gets himself stinking drunk, the old codger tremulously asked: "What's he drinkin'?" His wife had no clue -- she apparently had not seen the lush grapes that Noah was manipulating in the montage leading to his intoxication. "I think it's water," she bellowed. "Water?" the old guy said. "Is it poison or something?" I assume the entire scene, Ham cursed because of beholding of his father's nakedness, meant nothing to them at all. And throughout the showing of Darrin Aronofsky's film that I attended, the retarded adults gibbered and moaned, people muttered to one another, and the entire auditorium gurgled with phthisic coughing and gurgling. Oddly enough, about a third of Aronofsky's epic is very good and powerfully compelling. This is the part of the film, more or less following the orgy of CGI effects involving the building of the ark and the great, and unconvincing, deluge. Once the film shifts away from the biblical story into pure Midrash, a tale of Noah's madness and his conviction that all humanity, including his own family, must be expunged from the earth, the movie attains a kind of wacky grandeur and is genuinely fearsome. It's too bad that it takes the movie so long to find itself. The first two-thirds of the picture is Genesis as imagined by Peter Jackson -- it's all sub-LOTR (Lord of the Rings) stuff: the antediluvian world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland that looks a little like the decimated terrain of Mordor. It's inhabited by hordes of ruffians under the command of Tubal-Cain. Tubal-Cain looks like Rod Steiger and he is prone to Nietzschean speeches about man's will and his dominion ove the earth. As the film progresses, this rather static and caricatured figure, however, becomes more interesting and deepens -- ultimately, many viewers will end up siding with the Promethean Tubal-Cain in his opposition to the dour and half-crazy Noah. Noah interprets his mandate from God to require that he sacrifice his own family. Through an extra-biblical series of events the Noah family has acquired a step-daughter, apparently the victim of hysterectomy by dagger at the hands of Tubal-Cain's hordes. The stepdaughter is ostensibly barren until she runs into Methusaleh in his lava cave high atop an Icelandic mountain. Methusaleh is played by the leathery Anthony Hopkins and he's a doddering old fool who decides to restore the stepdaughter's womb and fallopian tubes. The stepdaughter immediately has sex with Shem, gets pregnant, and this pregnancy triggers Noah's resolve to kill the newborn children if they are female and, therefore, potentially mothers. There's a crazy logic about this all -- if human beings are intrinsically fallen and evil and if Noah is supposed to save all the "innocent" animals, it stands to reason that allowing humans to breed and, once again, swarm over the earth will just be replicating the evil that has attracted God's wrath. At least, this is Noah's view and, like an Old Testament prophet, which I guess he is in a way, Russell Crowe's Noah decides to kill the stepdaughter's children, twin girls. In some ways, Crowe is like John Wayne's character, the Indian-killer, in "The Searchers" -- Wayne's searcher vows to destroy his niece who was raped by the Sioux and who is married to an Indian chief, but when he sees the girl grown into Natalie Wood, he can't fulfill his oath. Similarly, Crowe has a tremendous scene where he poises a blade over the soft-spot on the head of a sleeping baby, is about to slaughter both infants, and, then, in a wonderful gesture that is brilliantly filmed spares the children. (The old guy behind me shouted out to his wife: "Did he kill the baby?" "I don't think so," Ma said.) The psycho-drama on the ark involves Tubal-Cain who is now a stowaway, aided and abetted by Ham who irrationally blames dad for the death of a girl whom he rescued from a mass grave in the camp of Tubal-Cain's orc-like army. Tubal-Cain is treating the beasts in the ark as a kind of Chinese buffet, chowing down on the sleeping quadrupeds and, even, tempting Ham to have a few bites. The ark crashes onto Mount Ararat just at the point that the stepdaughter is giving birth, the pigeon bearing some foliage in its beak alighting atop the big barge, and, in its bowels, Tubal-Cain, Noah, and Ham are all engaging in a desperate and gory knife fight -- this is wild and hysterical but it's also every effective. The first two-thirds of the film involves a big and unconvincing battle between Tubal-Cain's hordes and the Nephillim, called "The Watchers", imagined as stony figures who look somewhat like Transformers made of boulders -- they have the ability to mimic heaps of rock and, then, suddenly spring to life crushing everything around them. The Nephillim build the ark, an impressive edifice, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air come to it spontaneously to be anesthetized by Noah so that they slumber peacefully during the great Green Screen spectacle of the Flood. Most of this part of the film is unintentionally comical -- the Nephillim clamber all over the roof of the ark cutting and sawing like a crew of Mexican roofers and the CGI flocks of animals that enter the ark are, more or less, unconvincing as are most of the special effects in the film. (There is one great shot, however, of an ocean crag swarming with naked and drowning people that is worthy of Fritz Lang or Cecil B. DeMille -- it has a powerful old Silent Film magic about it.) Aronofsky is not good with special effects or battle-scenes. He's an old-fashioned director who makes his point with the human face and voice, and once he lets those aspects of the film prevail, the movie becomes, for a one-third of its length, an excellent picture of its type.