Thursday, April 3, 2014

Apres le Deluge


Endless rain here in Bloomington, Indiana.  The yard is waterlogged, puddles everywhere.  New plantings will be sitting in water-filled holes, I fear, and the grass seed is doomed.  Is this the weather gods' cheeky punishment for my last blog on drought?  Is it a tad solipsistic to imagine that the weather hinges on what I write in my blog?

To escape these gloomy thoughts, I went to see "Noah." Also to perhaps get a few tips in case the rains don't let up.  It turns out to be pretty good.  Plenty of Hollywood kitsch, of course (Vidal Sassoon hair, costumes via Flashdance, too much reliance on CGI), but still pretty good.  Only a few clunkers ("Shem, you will bury your mother and I." What, a cast and crew of hundreds and not a one knows the difference between I and me?).  

It's certainly not your father's Noah.  Aronofsky has a keen biblical imagination.  He fills in the gaps in the original (so many gaps...) both creatively and compellingly, given a certain suspension of disbelief that comes with the territory.  How did they get that ark built, after all, and who really were those "giants in the earth"?  Aronofsky comes up with some great answers, and thus the story holds together somehow.  Too many films today forget to hire a screenwriter, with terrible consequences for coherence and plausibility.  Aronofsky at least makes the effort, and usually it works.

Most importantly, it is a theologically rich film.  He doesn't let us off easy, and there is little of the trite "just-believe" schlock that seems to be headed our way this year on a raft of "inspirational" films and TV series.  No Orson Welles (or even James Earle Jones) voice of God to make us roll our eyes. Instead, there is some relatively sophisticated engagement with the theological challenges of the text:  the long-term implications of original sin, the perennial tension between justice and mercy, the fallibility of Noah.  Regarding that last, the film nicely explores the deadly stupidity of certain religious ideas that certain people (usually men) get stuck in their heads.  Noah's morbid obsession with humanity's sinfulness almost scotches it for all generations to come (us); only thanks to the maternal instinct of the film's heroines do we survive his foolishness.

And so it is a Noah for the 21st century, a Noah that gives women their due, and that just as importantly carries a strong ecological message.  This latter is in the text, of course, but it is buried, and it gets buried much deeper by traditional Christian exegesis that misconstrues man's "dominion" over nature.  The dominion model is rightfully demolished in this film, both by its placement in the mouth of the villain, and by the evidence all around of what happens when man's arrogance uses the world selfishly.  Of the deadly sins besetting humanity, the film clearly understands that the cardinal sin of modern man is greed.  The others are there in good supply, but greed it is that drives the collective ills of the modern age:  global warming, territorial aggression, corporate and Wall Street depredations, Citizens United.

None of this will make it past the towering mental firewalls of the biblical literalists, of course, but I like to think that the film's message will make an impact on the rest of us.  I entered the movie house in a downpour, and when I emerged two and half hours later, the sun was peeking through the clouds, and the sky was just the color of the sky above Ararat.  God was in His heaven again, and the world, if not exactly all right, was looking less gloomy.  It's a good film.  Even the New Yorker says so.  Go see it.    


1 comment:

  1. Send some of that rain down here, we could use it.
    You description of the movie luls me into a sense of pehaps it doesn't suckness. But not for long. You are far more tolerant of Hollywood crap than I. Willing to look beneath the shite (hey, this is a gardening blog after all) for deeper meaning and redeaming messages.
    Strange though, not a single link to more information. I sure would like to know more about Ararat

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