Noah
Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures
Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky

The Unknown Known
Produced by The Weinstein Company, History Films, and Moxie Pictures
Written and directed by Errol Morris
Distributed by RADIUS-TWC

In Darren Aronofsky’s telling of the Noah story, Cain’s descendant Tubalcain (Ray Winstone) confronts his creator, growling these words: “I am a man made in your image.  Why will you not converse with me?”  It’s a reasonable question.  If we’re made in his image, shouldn’t we hear from the old guy now and then?  Or is it that Tubalcain isn’t listening closely enough?  Aronofsky’s Noah (Russell Crowe) listens and listens—slavishly, one might say.  But for all his attention, he seems not so much enlightened as driven furiously mad, as Tubalcain discovers to his regret.  Noah locks him out of his ark when the flood arrives, explaining that Tubalcain and his people are not innocent.  Short on rations during a drought, they occasionally trade women for food.  There must be some other vices, but what they are we never learn.  Maybe Winstone’s wonderfully chafing voice is sin enough.

To be fully appreciated, the Old Testament’s narratives needed a demythologizing scrub, as my college professors used to say.  For instance, Noah’s story was a forecast of christening.  The waters of the Flood were a symbol of the baptismal water ladled onto an infant’s brow or, in some sects, the lake into which postulants are dunked.  In either case, the point was that the Christian candidate underwent a cleansing preparatory to being accepted into the fold.  Seemed reasonable to me.  It didn’t trouble me that the cleansing submersion and rebirth derived from a story in which God, piqued by some human rowdiness, drowns the entire race, save Noah and his immediate family.  I wasn’t bothered because I was an incurious lout who generally believed what my intellectual betters said.  Besides, who wanted to take the deeds of the Old Testament God literally?  At the time of my education, my Roman Catholic Church wisely made it a point not to encourage Bible reading.  Good thinking there.  Had my friends and I paid attention to Scripture, even fewer of us would still be Christian.

To be blunt, the Old Testament is crammed with tribal maunderings of a seriously paranoid people who, despite thinking themselves chosen, paradoxically felt they were continuously under God’s wanton thumb.  While the New Testament does a good job of softening divine crankiness, it does so only by dint of putting the mad torment of being human on one man’s shoulders.  Progress, certainly, but at a price.  I’m glad it was paid, but I can’t help wondering how an all-merciful divinity would want its cost exacted in the first place, especially now that the day of my own payment is hurrying near.  Cowardly, I suppose, but I don’t want to open my wallet.

But let’s turn away from mortality.  At school I learned how to handle Scripture, how to look past what the text literally said.  The forbidden fruit, the Flood, Jonah and the Whale—they could all be easily elevated when discussed as symbolic expression.  That was fine with me, although at 18 I wasn’t looking for elevation.  Earthy beguilement was more my interest, and the Song of Solomon rendered it aplenty.

And now to the film.  Whatever his symbolic role, as a character, Noah is far less interesting than the defiant Tubalcain.  Living in a wasteland, Noah has never gotten over his father’s murder.  He expects the worst at the hands of his implacable creator and can only think to obey him, however crazy his commands.  A flood’s coming, and he must build an ark?  Right away, boss.  And leave everyone else to drown because everyone else is corrupted?  If you say so, boss.  I longed for some Job-like complaints.

Aronofsky desperately lacks a sense of humor.  His other films also suffer from its absence, as those who have undergone the ordeal of watching his Requiem for a Dream know.  A humorless Noah is nearly unbearable, especially as played by an actor as irremediably dour as Crowe.  Let’s face it.  Like many another biblical prophet, Noah is altogether a wacko.  Few are sillier, especially when he herds the animal pairs on board his barn-size life raft.  John Huston understood this when he directed The Bible: In the Beginning in 1966, a bloated folly except for the Noah episode.  Huston himself played the prophet as a clownish old coot cowering at God’s every word, hoping the big guy would just go away.  How can you not cower at a voice threatening you and your family with obliteration unless you all bundle yourselves onto an ark with giraffes, panthers, boa constrictors, and vultures—and, one supposes, tsetse flies?

Once on board Aronofsky’s ark, Noah informs his family that, when the waters subside, and after they free the animals, they’re going to hunker down and wait for death.  No more begetting on his watch.  He’s become the ur-environmentalist: Nature good, man bad.  So when he learns that his daughter-in-law is pregnant, he politely tells her that, should the baby be a girl, he will have to kill her.  “Are you crazy?” his son asks.  Crowe could have redeemed the movie by responding, “As one of the bedbugs we brought aboard.”

The new Errol Morris documentary The Unknown Known concerns another bedbug, the honorable Donald Rumsfeld, who insisted America invade Noah’s Mesopotamian precincts in 2003.  In the film Rumsfeld, who memorably shrugged off Iraq’s devastation with the words “stuff happens,” answers Morris’s questions affably.  Not surprising.  Even when, under political pressure, he had to resign his post as secretary of defense in 2006, he remained outwardly jovial.  For the occasion, he gave a short speech in which he paid this tribute to his boss, George W. Bush: “I know with certainty that over time the contributions you made will be recorded by history.”  Not exactly going out on a limb.  The accomplished casuist had determined he would leave public service, making a claim so unshakable that even an IED couldn’t overturn it.  To seal the deal, he then gave one of his patented smiles—you know, the one that you expect from a particularly calculating uncle or, perhaps, the shark that behanded Captain Hook.  All in all, it was a performance befitting a man who had thrived disingenuously for 40 years on the public stage.

Morris tries to wrestle Rumsfeld into the truth time and again, but he hasn’t the success he did with Robert McNamara in The Fog of War (2003).  Whereas McNamara allowed the filmmaker to gain a purchase on him now and then, Rumsfeld, a champion wrestler at Princeton, slips from Morris’s holds again and again for 100 minutes.  When Morris asks him if, as secretary, he felt in control of history, or if he felt history was controlling him, Rumsfeld slips away easily with a self-canceling answer.  “Oh, neither,” he replies.  “Obviously you don’t control history, and you’re failing if history controls you.”  It’s a phantom dodge, and clearly one of Rumsfeld’s favorite stratagems.  It’s wielded so deftly that he’s gone almost before Morris reaches for him.  Here it is again when, with practiced insouciance, he mounts what he clearly believes is an unassailable case for invading Iraq in 2003.  After inspectors from both the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency spent nearly a year searching fruitlessly for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which were to be the Bush administration’s casus belli, Rumsfeld blithely points out with irrefutable logic and his shark smile that “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”  His justly famous Henny Penny speech following the invasion works much the same way, although it’s not as syllogistically impregnable.  Rumsfeld faces the press corps with that smile and announces that he picked up a newspaper reporting the bloodshed and chaos in Iraq following upon America’s shock-and-awe bombardment.  “I couldn’t believe it,” he chuckles with faux amazement:

I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest.  And it just was Henny Penny—“The sky is falling.”  I’ve never seen anything like it!  And here is a country that’s being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they’re free!

Watching this performance again, you find yourself having to sit on your hands not to applaud Rumsfeld’s jocular disregard for the maiming and death that were inflicted in our name.  Such a performance!  Such a smile!

But it’s Rumsfeld’s Orwellian deployment of language for its own sake that really gets you.  A man would have to have a heart of stone not to succumb to his verbal charm when he replies to a question about where the Iraq engagement is going.  He cleverly lectures the press on known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns to suggest he’s on top of all possibilities.  We knew some things with certainty, and we knew there were things we didn’t understand yet.  Finally, there were the unknown unknowns, a fancy, managerial way to say we weren’t yet managing some events because they were still out of our ken.  As it turned out, there were many, many unknown unknowns.  It wasn’t long before they flummoxed Rumsfeld entirely.  In the absence of Saddam Hussein’s salutary clampdown on Iraq’s traditional internecine butchery, Sunnis and Shi’ites predictably began going for each other’s throats once more, shattering our pretense to forging a democracy.

Finally, Morris asks Rumsfeld why he agreed to the interview.  Rumsfeld responds, “That’s a vicious question; I’ll be darned if I know.”

Darned?  Not likely.  There’s a known known here.  It’s the word enriched.  Whatever else the interview does, it will undoubtedly boost the sales of Rumsfeld’s latest book, Known and Unknown: A Memoir.  This is a man who knows he knows what he’s about.

It would take a second flood to cleanse away Rumsfeld’s known stink.