Noah

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly
Length: 138 minutes
Country: USA

Somewhat awkwardly poised at two opposite extremes of scale, Darren Aronofsky’s fantastical spin on the most timeless of Biblical tales survives its lack of balance by capturing the imagination and winning the heart of its spectator simultaneously. With lashings of raw emotion and chimerical imagination, Noah is as much a domestic melodrama as it is a sweeping visual effects epic, its unabashed farfetchedness countered by strong, highly human performances.

For all the visual richness and entertainment value on display, the movie feels rushed at times. Aronofsky struggles to cram the entirety of his expansive vision into the film’s conventional runtime, resulting in a decidedly efficient treatment of many sequences and a dissatisfying level of detail. While Noah, his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and their adopted daughter Ila (Emma Watson), perhaps owing to the performances behind the characters, are all satisfyingly developed, more peripheral characters are involved than the story has the natural remit to cover. Anthony Hopkins’s magical berry-craving grandfather figure Methuselah, while charismatic, serves as a disappointingly unenigmatic deus ex machina to the needs of the plot. The story is so familiar to us that plot twists are never expected or even suggested, making the self-determining barbarian Tubal Cain (Ray Winstone) a somewhat redundant and toothless villain, despite Winstone’s admirable efforts at the ruthless ‘real man’ act. While troubled middle brother Ham (Logan Lerman) is reasonably volatile and active, his older and younger siblings Shem (Douglas Booth) and Japheth (Leo McHugh) are given about as much agency and character as the animals on the ark.

Aronofsky’s neglect of said animals appears careless given their centrality to the ideal Noah’s strife is meant to serve. Their inclusion seems almost begrudging as they suddenly turn up to the ark, captured unimaginatively within a single, decidedly functional long shot. On the ark, they are then magically sent to sleep, and remain neither seen nor heard for the remainder of the film; they are a plot device that Aronofsky gets over with as quickly as possible and then literally puts to bed.

While its delightfully many flashes of fantasy are mesmerising and arresting, the movie’s greatest strength is its humanity.

The tension between the two scales upon which Noah attempts to operate simultaneously is more successfully navigated when reality and fantasy are held firmly separate, when the latter exists only in the former as a dream or story. It is these wonderfully constructed, rapidfire dream sequences in which we see flashes of Aronofsky’s well-proven flair for subtleties of the surreal. Elsewhere his direction is uncharacteristically mechanistic, though this is not always to the film’s detriment; the director never indulges himself in Noah, but rather keeps it entertaining and pacey through chopping up the action regularly and tightly restricting dialogue exchanges to highly orthodox shot-reverse shot treatment.

While its delightfully many flashes of fantasy are mesmerising and arresting, the movie’s greatest strength is its humanity. As the flood hits and the camera becomes trapped with Noah in his ark, the burden of the script’s success rests squarely on the dynamic between Crowe and Connelly as torn husband and wife. Fortunately, the contrast between the two is brilliantly handled, with Noah torturing himself through aggressive internalisation and Naameh’s overt expressions of loving despair rendering emotional turmoil in polar opposite terms. As the merciless racking of tension and tragedy increasingly animates one, it hardens and forces further inward the other. It is the exchanges between these two conflicting personalities that heightens the emotional potential of this passage above that of all others in the film. Emma Watson provides a confident and convincing performance as the strong but helpless daughter caught in the middle of the battlefield. At its sometimes extra-terrestrial distances, Noah is visually powerful and feels suitably epic, but it is more surprisingly effective at this sort of close, completely human range.

But what holds this captivating and imaginative film back from brilliance is the constant, irresolvable dilemma it faces in choosing between small and large scales. Close-ups are as frequent as landscape long shots, colourful hallucinatory visions as fully integrated as gritty domestic insights, but while it succeeds at either of end of these spectra, Noah is desperately lacking of a middle ground. A bold decision to either keep distance from the humans at the story’s centre or conversely to neglect the creation-sized bigger picture entirely might have been riskier, but in taking the safe options Noah limits itself to a well-executed but firmly conventional sort of entertainment. the kind of which belies its highly imaginative director even more so than his effortlessly dreamlike subject matter. While it has its problems, Noah ​is nonetheless an enjoyable take on a classic and powerful story.

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