First of all, let’s acknowledge that Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” was a bad idea. Sure, movies based on biblical material have been made numerous times in the past, and Ridley Scott’s upcoming “Exodus,” with Christian Bale as Moses, suggests the Old Testament well has not run dry. But most scripture-based films were made in a vastly different era of American cultural history, when Hollywood was devoted to delivering “family entertainment” and Christian fundamentalism barely existed as a social force. More recently, it’s been important to choose a side: Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ” and Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” were aimed at different audiences. This mightily strange motion picture, however, is a classic Hollywood blend of “devil’s candy” – a major movie star, the control-freak auteur of “Black Swan,” a budget reported at $130 million and one of the sketchiest episodes in the Abrahamic tradition, drawn from a few sentences in the Book of Genesis – designed to please everyone and likely to please almost no one.
So there’s the bad news: “Noah” is a highly ambitious movie but in many ways a failure. It’s almost certain to wind up in that category critic Stuart Klawans has described as “film follies”: large, expensive and often career-swamping dream projects, in the tradition pioneered by Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” and D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance.” (A one-word title often seems to be a key ingredient: “Metropolis,” “Cleopatra,” “Fitzcarraldo,” “Ludwig.” Clearly Francis Coppola should have dropped the “Now” and just gone with “Apocalypse.”) But as with so many such follies, “Noah” is also worth seeing, and not just as a slow-motion car wreck made at vast expense. Amid the CGI elephants, the Nick Nolte stone giants, the overacting and dialogue howlers, the WTF science-fiction flights of fancy and the attempt to wrest a dramatic plot out of a bare-bones mythological narrative, there’s considerable daring, fire and passion in this tale of watery apocalypse. Not to mention a character perfectly suited to Russell Crowe at his most brooding and portentous. If we say that Crowe plays Noah as a domineering patriarch with an antediluvian moral code, I guess for once that’s not a metaphor!
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