DARREN ARONOFSKY: PI (1998) / NOAH (2014)
Until very recently, Darren Aronofsky’s reputation rested mainly on his catalogue of surreal and often psychologically disturbing movies, films such as Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan demonstrating a clear talent for drawing out the very bleakest aspects of human nature. It is a talent that has been clear from the very beginning. Pi focuses on Max, a paranoid, socially inept mathematical genius whose super-normal level of brain function clearly strays into the realm of the torturous as he pursues an increasingly fixated quest to identify and fathom the nature of a mysterious 216 digit code. It is this obsessive quality of Max’s neurotic nature that gives Aronofsky the chance to do what he was from now on always to do best – to explore the concept of the narrow borderlands between an obsession and complete psychological destruction. All shot in grainy black and white against a scratchy, electric-esque soundtrack, Aronofsky skilfully and gradually builds a clear sense – for both Max and the audience – that there is simply no end to Max’s torment; no escape, no rest and no relief. It is the same feeling that pervades most of his films – the desperate, gradual realization that the protagonists are not the masters of whatever it is they are pursuing, but the victims.
So confident and complete is the model of Aronofsky’s style of film making in Pi that the fact that this is his debut makes it almost seem audacious. Aronofsky had arrived.
But then, one morning, Aronofsky woke up having had some kind of personality bypass – and thought he was Ridley Scott. The result was Noah, a biblical epic of ambitious but categorically mainstream proportions.
Noah is an admirable (read: brave) re-telling of one of the most iconic stories from the Bible, and it is unmistakably impressive. But classic Aronofsky it is not. There are certainly glimpses of him; the juddering, disjointed vision sequences are stunning (and recognizably the work of the long-term partnership between Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique) and the metallic soundtrack accompanying these scenes add to the nightmarish quality that has always been such an important part of Aronofsky’s style. We also have the psychological aspect, in Noah’s descent from commitment to his task into advanced obsessive mania, which is finished off with a dash of intended infanticide, just in case we missed all the yelling and shadow-skulking (Aronofsky couldn’t have upset the traditional view of a much loved character more than if he’d made a film about a criminal Santa Claus).
Of course, all directors are likely to branch out at some point – and Aronofsky has given us a worthy film in Noah that is still visionary in both its themes and its delivery (although for some he sacrificed too much of the story’s original pulls – Evan Almighty pays more attention to the arrival of the animals than Noah does). But whereas Aronofsky usually blends the substance of his story with his style, here the substance takes centre stage, with the style being left in more isolated pockets. To some extent this is necessary – Noah’s visions are themselves isolated by nature, and Aronofsky only unleashing the full extent of his own imagination during these sequences is a clever device. But whereas we knew from the opening credits of Pi that this was Aronofksy, it would be perfectly possible to get to the end of Noah and still not have realized that it was him. It is this that makes the most recent film of this director an anomaly, not the first.
