On the way to the cinema, to get us in the mood, my son read
the familiar story from the opening chapters of Genesis. What struck me, as I listened, being careful
not to miss the junction, was its sparseness, and its oddness. It seemed to raise more questions than it
answered: What was so evil about the world that meant it had to be destroyed?
In what ways was Noah so distinctive, so good?
Why was God so concerned with the ‘creeping, crawling things’? Who were these ‘Nephilim’? What was all that business at the end, with
the naked binge drinking in the cave? (The favourite Bible verse of a former
member of a youth group of mine!)
Having successfully arrived, and watched the film, I can
report that Darren Aronofsky, the director and chief creative force behind it,
seems to have been exercised by many of the same thoughts. This blockbusting,
roller-coaster, perhaps the ultimate apocalyptic disaster movie, is characterised
not so much by its epic scale as it thoughtfulness.
Any adaptation of Biblical material faces familiarproblems. Daring to deviate from the
text, to any extent, runs the risk of criticism and controversy, yet submitting
to the traditional conventions potentially means engaging only a few and
challenging even fewer. These are
stories which we all know, don’t we?
Well, maybe not. Aronofsky’s
Jewish roots give him insight to explore some of the wealth of rabbinic material that has grown up around this story, and to explore the gaps in the
received narrative whilst, largely, keeping the basic pegs that have been
provided. For me, this approach provides
a rich resource for hearing the story afresh, not uncritically, but in a powerfully
distinctive way that so often the over sanitised fuzzy-felt, nursery rhyming
Noah of contemporary Christian faith has failed to do.
So, how was this story told?
Essentially as a conflict, between good and evil, inevitably, but also
between God and a humanity that had come to struggle to hear him aright, even
the best of them. A creation torn, a family divided, a judgement, or a rescue,
in the balance.
This Noah is a very flawed hero, indeed it’s his self-awareness
of this which provides so much of the tension.
The textual truth of his being ‘righteous, within his own generation’ is
revealed as, perhaps, damning with faint praise. The key character conflict between Noah and
Ray Winstone’s, Tubal Cain, at times appears to offer the two men as flip sides
of the same coin; tyranny driven by humanist self-serving on the one hand (‘We
are men!’) and the potential of blind religious fundamentalism on the
other. The inserting of an obvious Abrahamic
motif here only presses the question harder; ‘How far might God require me to
go?’ Naturally, from a Christian perspective, this is somewhat uncomfortable,
it’s meant to be. The depiction of Noah shutting down his critical and
questioning faculties in the face of unimaginable suffering remains tempting
but, to my mind, is rarely what faith requires.
God, it has been noted, is not mentioned by name in the
film. ‘The Creator’ is all pervasive though.
He is hard to hear, many feel abandoned by him, yet he is still sought. His
history, at one point beautifully portrayed in a segment destined to be clipped
and shared in many a worship service I’m sure, remains inspiring, his future
calling compelling. He defines what is
good and yet calls on other to demonstrate it.
Ultimately, in this telling, Noah’s bitter disillusion,
suggested by the aforementioned cave drinking incident, is relieved by a
reminder from an adoptive daughter of his responsibility, before this God, to
choose good over evil, love over death, and to be, a father, a grand-father, a
good man. The business of effective
choosing and being remains the task of faith today.
