EYES ON THE SKY?Russell Crowe stars in ‘Noah’.
Looks like rain, Ted
Cinema
Daniel Carey
THE score for the 1995 movie ‘Die Hard With A Vengeance’ included the American Civil War song ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’. The tune is better known in Ireland as the children’s song ‘The Animals Went In Two By Two’, AKA ‘Into The Ark’.
Depending on which version of the nursery rhyme you heard as a child, you may think the animals ‘laughed at’ or ‘left out’ the monkey because of his tricks. The distinction is important, leaving the primate either a popular jester or – given that The Great Flood was coming – condemned to certain death. Similarly, did the animals coming in five by five stay alive by hugging each other or eating each other? It’s a conflict over lyrics that could be dubbed ‘parental guidance versus natural selection’.
The Noah I learned about as a child was a good man whose family was spared by God because of his goodness. The individual played by Russell Crowe in Darren Aronofsky’s new picture is a psychopath. He spends the first half giving vegetarianism a bad name, and the second half plotting to wipe out his offspring. If this is God’s representative on earth, I’m ready to shake hands with the devil.
Aronofsky, the talented director behind ‘Requiem For A Dream’, ‘The Wrestler’ and ‘Black Swan’, has made an environmental morality tale out of the most environmentally unfriendly episode of the Bible.
We begin with a brief history of Genesis and that oft-quoted cliché, ‘when Noah was a lad’. The adult Noah has a couple of dreams and visions in which he realises that the Creator (as God is called throughout) plans to destroy the world. The ark gets built, not by humans or animals, but by an army of mobile rocks (whose startling appearance makes the Irish phenomenon of the moving statues seem positively plausible).
Anthony Hopkins rocks up as Methuselah, Noah’s grandfather, a 969-year-old whose search for berries is as close as the enterprise comes to a humorous motif. Ray Winstone gets to scream at the sky in a vain attempt to have a chat with the man upstairs. Emma Watson plays the adult version of a girl Noah rescued as a child. Jennifer Connelly features as Noah’s wife, one of the few consistent voices of reason. The performances are solid enough. But surely the focus here should be on the water?
Instead, we get long, über-pessimistic parables about the end of mankind. Having begun a flawed hero, Crowe ends up playing Hannibal Lecter to Connelly’s Clarice Starling. Interpretations of God’s will are thrown around like snuff at a wake. The scenery is the most interesting aspect of the project in its later stages.
After the water recedes, Noah’s son Ham channels his inner Kevin Costner (from ‘Waterworld’) and announces: “I don’t belong here.” That 1995 flick was famously (and rather unfairly) ridiculed upon its release for its hefty price tag – at $172 million, it was then the most expensive picture of all time. Nineteen years later, ‘Noah’ (which, lest we forget, also includes a lot of H2O), is being branded ‘the world’s first $125 million stoner film’. Desperate to go down a different route to the Biblical epics of the Charlton Heston era, it may end up in the same pile, beloved only of sleep-deprived students who’ve smoked a little too much weed.
The last big-screen treatment of this subject came in the Steve Carrell vehicle ‘Evan Almighty’. To say that ‘Noah’ is slightly better than Tom Shadyac’s 2007 (alleged) comedy should not be taken as much of a recommendation.
Rating 4 out of 10
