Noah (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                  2 hrs & 17 min, color, 2014

Biblical movies do not come any more large scale than this one.  Certainly it is the most elaborate of any attempt yet to pump life into the ancient fable of the man assigned by God to the task of saving the world from total destruction by the flood waters.  Though the picture has racked up big grosses, it does not seem to speak to people of all faiths and persuasions and current mindsets.  In a word, it is not a movie for everyone, for all tastes, not even for all secular interests.  To the extent that it speaks on behalf of human survival and the value of even the smallest morsel of life on this earth it rings a somewhat momentous bell, one deserving to be heard.  But there is much more in it to be contended with, and that additional content is what divides one audience from another.  It forces one to determine where she/he stands in relation to cosmological assumptions. 

Let me explain:

“Noah” is the movie for you, if you are comfortable with its concept of deity.  In this Old Testament myth, God is an arbitrary ruler and manipulator of the forces of nature, a vengeful scourge of human masses, and, I might add, a deceiver, a trickster, a silent fury.  By his silence he tantalizes his enemies as well as his followers and messes with their minds so as to push them close to the bounds of sanity and sobriety to get what he wants from them.

 “Noah” is the movie for you if you can abide a three-decker universe, the earth as a plain between an upper heaven and a subterranean hell. 

“Noah” is the movie for you, if you do not mind keeping company for two hours with savagery, brutality and bestiality portrayed as means of righteous purification. 

“Noah” is the movie for you if you like your heroes rugged and raw, stubborn and prone to delusion.

Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the man is beyond reproach, as are the fine performances by Jennifer Connelly as Noah’s wife and Emma Watson as his daughter-in-law.   Crowe makes the man as human as any mythological figure could ever be.  As long as the script concentrates on his personal struggle to protect his family and ascertain the will of the Almighty, it rings home.  Any of us who are frightened and worried by what we read in the papers and hear on television news broadcasts about the encroachment of bald evil across the globe in so many forms or the threat of ecological holocaust can feel some identification with him – until he sheds the vestments of common sense and loses his mental grip.  To become protective of his own at such a time is understandable, but when he equates the divine will with self-destructive, drunken cravings, he becomes a creature hard to identify, something other-worldly and almost monstrous. 

And now I would like to add one more note of qualification:  “Noah” is the movie for you, if you are content with an obscure and presumptuous approach to the subject of evil.   Evil is never defined in the story, even though it is supposed to be the reason for all the drownings and slayings.  We are taken through quick sketches of old wars during the generations from Adam and Eve until the arrival of Noah – the descendents of Cain killing people, etc.  But what is the primal cause and explanation for this evil?  What has gone wrong in the interplay of fallible races and peoples that blood has been so exceedingly shed?  Mere overviews and summaries will not suffice.  We arrive too late in the lengthy saga to get any real insight into how God was driven to destroy “the wicked.”  People are seemingly wicked simply because they oppose Noah, and we know that that could not be true.  

I am grateful for the fact that we never have to listen to God speaking in a human voice.  God remains mysterious, relating to the obedient through intuition and instinct.  Revelation does not come about easily.  No handwriting in the sky and no oracles!  I am grateful for that.  But evil in this picture never takes on dimensionality.  The brutes are just there, and the armed warfare goes on and on – at too much length for my taste.  And what was the point of writing Methuselah into the script?  It is always something of a pleasure to watch Anthony Hopkins at work, but why has Director/Writer Darren Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel given him so little to do?  His part in preparing Noah for the flood is somewhat vague.

Perusing the footage, it appears that a “cast of thousands” has been employed in the making of the film.  When I was growing up, such an advertising claim was considered to be a drawing factor in the marketing of many a big budget spectacle.  But now we have computer generation, and the hordes can be simulated, and in my estimation this device has been overdone.  I have spoken about this in an earlier writing and I will say it again.  The Special Effects people seem to think that what they now have the capacity to do they must do.  If it can be done, throw everything you have got into it and do not worry about excess.  What has become of balance?   Would it not have been enough for Noah to be faced with a small local tribe when getting the Ark built and getting it off the ground?  But no, they have to have him facing a swarming armada of faceless warriors bearing weapons that look as if they have been forged in a foundry.  That early in civilization!?  The drubbing that these marauders take seems to require divine intervention in the form of hideous giants who claim to be fallen angels.  Humanity is supposed to be scattered all through the known world, so how convincing is it that all living flesh seems to know of what Noah is up to?   Did they read about it on Facebook? 

It is not until the story turns personal and domestic (at last) that it began to grip me on a somewhat rewarding emotional level.  In the last hour, after the enemy has been vanquished and the floods begin, we find Noah’s household divided.  His three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, are all in hateful conflict with their father and for quite plausible reasons, as are the wife and the daughter-in-law.  They all have to contend with Noah’s psychosis, his obsession with wiping humanity off the map, even to the extent of killing his infant twin granddaughters.  I was profoundly shaken by the internal battle he had to fight to rediscover his heart of love.  But oh the intricate plot we have to plod through on the way to this emotional catharsis!

From time to time we hear of someone or some group who claim they have found the remnant of Noah’s Ark on some mountain or in some archeological dig.  The most enlightened of us will look askance at such claims.  The only place where the Ark will ever be found is in the pages of Genesis.  The story is not history; it is mythology, and mythology can only come meaningfully to life if it succeeds as metaphor.  In this department I find the long tedious epic seriously lacking. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

The Jekyll / Hyde Mystique (Essay by Bob Racine)

When I was eight years old my mother, upon my insistence, took me one evening to see the movie “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” starring Spencer Tracy in the dual role.  Other kids had spoken of it as the latest horror flick not to be missed.  It scared the stuffings out of me and gave me nightmares as well as day-mares for at least a week afterward.  It was hard for me to be alone in our apartment.  I imagined that I saw Hyde standing in every doorway, glowering at me with murder on his mind.  Naturally I did not let any of my friends know about my internal emotional reaction to having seen it.  I did not want to be considered a scaredy-cat.  (I believe that was the slang term in vogue among youth at the time.)  I do not recall that I discussed it with anybody, not even my parents.   

Another fifteen years would pass before I would ever see it again – at a theater in my college town.  By then I was intellectually distanced enough that I could understand what Jekyll in his experiments was up to, what he was trying to prove.  That time, no nightmares, just a studied approach to the projected drama of human transformation, however strange it might still have seemed!  When I was eight I entered into the fantasy of it, the same way I later learned to get excited and shudder as I watched Frankenstein pictures.  It was all a game of make believe, and I knew it.  My cousin and I loved to play the roles of the monster, the Wolf man and Dracula.  We would switch parts and pulled other playmates into playing with us.  But in college I was ready to consider “Jekyll / Hyde” a subject for academic study.  I became aware that a famous author, Robert Louis Stevenson, was behind the creation of the tale, the same one who thrilled us with the adventures in “Treasure Island.”  And over the years as a student of theology I began to ask what this children’s author was up to in writing a book that would terrify the most impressionable of kids, namely me. 

In case anyone reading this is uninformed as to the nature and content of the original book, let me lay it out briefly.  Jekyll is a London physician who devotes himself to research and experiments regarding the brain and how it might be influenced to separate the good side of an individual from the evil or dark side.  He decides to use himself as a guinea pig to test the effectiveness of a drug compound in pursuit of a cure for moral imbalance. He assumes that the good side of him, released from the evil side, can go on to better fulfill its creative destiny.  His experiment is successful.  Too successful!  After much writhing and wrestling with the pain the drug causes, Edward Hyde, this corrupt alter ego that has been dormant in his psyche for all his previous life, is born.  Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde is physical in form as well as mental.  He comes out shorter in height and more gruff and unsavory and violently antisocial in appearance, not recognizable as the man everyone knows.  The doctor is pleased at first that he can change back to his respectable self at any time, a practice that he thinks will keep Hyde under control. 

By night Hyde becomes a prowler and a molester; by day Jekyll is the loving and caring doctor.  But somewhere along the way Jekyll gets hooked on the habit.  Hyde makes an ignominious name for himself and slowly takes possession of Jekyll.  Eventually he is able to put in an appearance without the drug.  The outcome of this calamity is tragic.  A crucial turning point in the story is the murder of a member of Parliament, with Hyde identified publicly as the murderer.  Jekyll knows at this juncture that he must keep his nemesis hidden, and after futile attempts to perfect the drug and restore order to his life and person, both monster and monster maker meet their odious and disreputable death.  

It does not take much brain power to imagine how Stevenson’s contemporaries in the 1880s responded to his writing.  What a shaggy dog tale!  What an absurd scroll of circumstances!  What a spook show!  I am sure some pious folk considered it obscene or blasphemous or heathenish.  After all, the soul is God’s domain; no medical scientist has the right to try to muck around in it!   Whoever heard of a drug that can alter human personality?  Whoever heard of multiple personality or fracturing in any form?  Whoever heard of evil as an issue of the nervous system or related in any way to it?   Is not evil the work of the devil in the heart?  Whoever heard of the notion that the body’s chemistry can be an agent in the manifestation of evil?  Whoever  heard of the facets of the brain having anything to do with moral choice?  Whoever heard of the idea that good and evil uneasily coexist as factors in the human mind or that there is evil in the most righteous of us?  How much agony of mind and heart Stevenson had to go through being so far ahead of his time and braving these assaults I cannot say.  Probably on the order of what Darwin endured.  The two men, after all, were contemporaries.

As far back in my adult life as I can remember, I have been fascinated with this gripping narrative.  The many dramatizations of it on screen that have come about had a lot to do with that.  In fact, the release of the Spencer Tracy version did not mark the first time Stevenson’s tale had been brought to the screen.  John Barrymore portrayed the tragic doctor in a silent movie treatment.  Frederic March took a hand at him in a 1932 version, which won him an Oscar – just nine years before the Tracy one that sent me into those fearful jitters.  There was at least one live TV rendition in the 1950s and Kirk Douglas at a later point stirred up a squall in a TV musical derived from the fable.  My latest stimulus is a new book by a first time author named Daniel Irvine entitled “Hyde,” in which he tells an expanded version strictly from the view point of the monstrous alter ego.  In fact, Hyde narrates it all in the first person.  

Jekyll’s motivation in following his doomed course of action in his secret lab has previously been assumed to be plain curiosity.  He just wants to find out if he can bring about the desired result and pokes around like any scientist until he strikes pay dirt.  But Irvine has broadened the basis of motivation by ascribing to the doctor a torturous childhood, under the domination of an abusing father who forced him to debauch himself and robbed him of his sense of manhood by all kinds of unspeakable means.  This Jekyll strives for a disassembling of his persona as a means of cleansing himself of his alleged taint.  He wants a companionable version of himself from whom he can learn and whose heart and mind he can inhabit.  He begins his experiment not knowing what he will bring forth but hoping for a renewed self.   A process of cleansing and redemption! 

He is dismayed and undone by the emergence instead of a truly corrupt alter ego in Hyde, whom he sees is more evil and unconscionable than he himself has ever been.  And, as I have indicated, he finds Hyde impossible to suppress.  Jekyll even begins to enjoy being Hyde on his secret forages in the dark of the city.  To keep Hyde under a measure of control he pretends to his household and friends that Hyde is a protégé entitled to come and go in his house as he pleases, while he secretly purchases another property for Hyde’s own personal and forbidden use.      

There are points in this new novel when I was made to feel some sympathy for this ugly furtive character.  He believes Jekyll has brought him out of dormancy and given him all this freedom for a purpose but has difficulty at first figuring out what the doctor expects of him.  What emerges is the realization that Jekyll relies on him to do the evil that Jekyll himself does not have the nerve to do.  Hence the murder of the member of Parliament by whom Jekyll feels threatened with exposure!  And, of course, Hyde becomes painfully aware that his survival depends upon Jekyll’s, they being inseparable.      

Actually, the publishers of “Hyde” have included Stevenson’s original fictional work, entitled “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” at the rear of the binding.  It is a very short work, less than a hundred pages in length, and sticking it there poses no problem whatsoever.  It gives the reader a chance to see how Irvine’s writing has emerged from Stevenson’s and to catch up on the evolution of the saga. 

Let me make it clear that, brilliantly written as “Hyde” is, I do not recommend it for the general reading public, only for those as fascinated with it as I am and for those who still thrill to a juicy Gothic mystery.  My purpose here is simply to remind us all that we are more than what we appear to be on the surface.  The human psyche is rigged and we have a long way yet to plow to understanding adequately the nature of life’s dark, shadowy side, in which so many individuals on this planet get trapped.  Some are snared before they are even old enough to grasp what is happening to them.

In a time in our world’s history when senseless killings are taking place – on the order of Va. Tech’s sniper and the insane young man who tried to take the life of the Congresswoman a few years back in Arizona – notable authorities on the subject of insanity and brain chemistry are varied in their explanations of cause.  The rigorous search for scientific answers to the problem of bald evil goes on, as we wait for further disclosures.  In the meantime, we all grope for ways to subdue our own demons.  We experience thoughts and impulses that we would not want to admit to our friends that we house.  We deal with internal foes that are sometimes monstrous and threatening, however respectable our outward reputations might be or our otherwise good intentions.  We are many shades rolled into one.  We are not one dimensional; we are multi-dimensional, and keeping our multi-dimensionality in harness is not a simple matter.  

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

The Name Is Garner (Obit by Bob Racine)

How does a motion picture actor become an embodiment of the peacemaker for his audiences over a decades-long career without the blatant use of agitprop or rash activism or pontification or exploitation and without in the slightest compromising his commitment to being entertaining, mostly funny and versatile?  How does he get away with being handsome and likeable but still a challenge to the libertarians and hawks among us?  If he were still alive, which he has not been since July 19, we could ask the one and only James Garner.  No, he was not a Shakespearian provocateur or a multilayered interpreter of complex, antiheroic, self-destructive, edgy eccentrics, a la Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, or Robert Deniro among numerous others.  He was just plain Garner with his own special, unassuming, unpretentious appeal.  He was quite the professional and quite the tender spirit, whatever mischief he got into on screen, and he got into plenty.

He had a laid back approach to the crafting of a hero, however dramatic the material.  You can trace his work from his big screen debut appearance in “Sayonara” in 1957 (at a time when he had already established himself in the iconic role of Bret Maverick in the classic TV western) to his most recent big screen contributions and you will be hard pressed to find any macho posturing or any grim faced steely tough guy swagger.  In that supporting part in “Sayonara” opposite Marlon Brandon and Red Buttons he was an American GI stationed in Tokyo in the early 1950s confronting his military superiors about the exclusion of Japanese women from servicemen’s social clubs, spurred on by his affiliation with a native show girl.  His character in “Sayonara” might have had a personal interest in the rights of the woman he was courting, but it sounded a note of tolerance much needed in the postwar world.       

 

In all the scads of movies he made in the following half century you will not find gory scenes, however much he collided with enemies.  You find a man who will go out of his way to avoid a fight.  He would rather con or humor his way out of confrontation than push his luck.  On one episode of “The Rockford Files,” he was wounded by an assailant’s knife.  Of course he recovered in time to sue for damages and to demand from the offending party an apology for which money would not compensate.  He had Rockford speak these words on the witness stand with great conviction: “There is no such thing as a small injustice.”  The conventional movie tough guy would never ask for an apology; he would be satisfied to take it out of someone’s hide or nose.  But not Garner!

I always enjoyed watching him, whatever the subject matter.  But there are three movies that stand out in my judgment in which he drove the peacenik   point home without having to play a pious crusader.  He demonstrated how a man can be dogged without being a do-gooder.  One was “The Great Escape” in 1963, a most exciting adventure about American prisoners of war during World War II.  He was again a serviceman, doing his sly part in planning for a massive breakout from a German stalag, the story based upon a true event.  He played the procurer, who knew how to find implements and materials needed in the escape’s planning and execution, most especially fake passports.  But unlike a few others in the bunch he was not hardboiled.  His was the friendly sleight-of-hand at work, and he cared greatly about his fellows, even assuming responsibility for a blind companion who needed guidance out of the country.  And late in the game, when so many others are congratulating themselves on their cleverness, he raised the question, after the enterprise ended in several deaths, whether it was all worth it.  He was a convincing advocate of good sense.  Again, his contribution was not contrived; he fit right into what was an entertaining, mostly tongue-in-cheek game of wits and imagination.  I have seen this picture many times – one of my very favorites among the oldies.

“Support Your Local Sheriff,” premiered in 1970, is a western about a small frontier town gone amok in the midst of a gold rush.  Garner is the unassuming stranger who takes the job of local lawman and cleans things up.  Sounds quite familiar, does it not!  Except that this one is played entirely – I mean entirely – for laughs.  It is a send-up of the standard horse opera, the likes of “Gunfight at OK Corral” and “High Noon” into the bargain, and if I were a betting man and had any way to prove it, I would bet my last quarter that the script was written with nobody but Garner in mind.  He may even have had a hand in writing it.  I cannot imagine anyone else doing justice to this cool character.  Yes, his sheriff is fast and accurate with a gun, but he uses it with great annoyance, with an exasperated intake of breath and a how- long-do-I-have-to-go-on-doing-this-tiresome-thing air.  In one scene, when an antagonist pushes a loaded gun into his face, he sticks his finger into the barrel of the gun and gives the guy a dressing down for being so reckless with a loaded weapon.  He acts as if taming the town is just a minor detail he has to put behind him, before he sets out to Australia, where he plans to make a home.       

But the one that has come to be recognized as the quintessential Garner and the one he maintained was his favorite until his recent dying day is an anti-war comedy with an outrageous plot, in which a fast talking, self-professed coward (want to guess who?) is hoodwinked into becoming a D-Day hero.  If any of you have not seen “The Americanization of Emily” (1964), I strongly recommend it as an ingenious serving of naughty fun mixed with pacifist parody.  There has never been a so-called war picture like it in my memory.  Some of the sassiest dialogue ever penned rolls off just about every tongue.  The other tongues include those of Julie Andrews as the young war widow he falls for, who takes pleasure in his snide assessments of the war apparatus; James Coburn as an officer who gets carried away with a hair brained scheme to carry out orders as well as his own sex-capades;  and Melvyn Douglas is the half-berserk general who comes up with that hero-making scheme that almost costs Garner’s coward his life.  Garner absolutely delighted in the picture, as did the American public, one that probably came close to giving John Wayne a stroke.

What is so amazing about his attraction to this species of movie is the fact that he was himself a man with an extensive military record.  He did time in the Merchant Marine and the Coast Guard before the Korean War broke out and he was pulled into Army combat.  Twice he was wounded, and twice he was decorated.  He had the background required to make his satirizing of the military mentality ring true.  He was not the artless, gullible outsider monkeying around with slippery feet in a domain he knew nothing about.  He had been there in the real struggle.  Apparently between his Army days and his induction into screen stardom he underwent a metamorphosis of attitude toward authority and the bloody business of the battlefield in which he had been schooled. 

Garner could also play romantic parts quite persuasively.  He had a notable success, both critically and commercially, with “Murphy’s Romance” (1985), costarring with Sally Field, and in his younger days he cavorted with Doris Day in “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling.”  And he could portray deep emotion when he wanted to.  In the TV movie “Promise” he played straight the part of a man trying to serve the needs of an emotionally disturbed brother (James Woods).  He actually shed tears in that one when his efforts to help proved fruitless.  His last appearance was in the movie adaptation of the bestseller “The Notebook.”  He not only attended the bedside of a wife afflicted with Alzheimer’s but lived right with her in her nursing home and served as an intercessor to their grown children.  He assumed that role passionately. 

Garner was never threatening or diabolical.  But he was no-nonsense, dead-in-earnest and tough-minded when the script called for him to be, and there were many times when it did.  He espoused the naturalistic school of acting.  So often you could have sworn that he was ad-libbing his lines, but the fact is every word you heard him speak came from the script; he knew how to make any dialogue sound spontaneous. 

Not surprisingly in his private life he was a paragon of peacefulness (except when he got hooked on racing cars and injured himself.)  He backed civil rights to the hilt, taking part in the 1963 March on Washington during which he had a third row seat listening to and supporting King’s “I’ve Got a Dream” speech.  Five years later he was in attendance at King’s funeral.  He gave liberally to worthy causes.  And not the least of his civilized accomplishments was staying married to the same woman for his last fifty-eight years and building a healthy home life.  You look in vain to find any blemish to his character – no scandals, no extramarital flings, no drunken orgies, no tax fraud.   Whoever said that Hollywood corrupts its devotees?  You do not have to look any further than the life and work of this winsome and amusing and generous man to be convinced that it does not have to be so.  I for one mourn his passing at the age of 86, and I will miss him ever so much. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.