Ranking Darren Aronofsky's films

Aronofsky’s lifelong obsession with the Old Testament story of Noah took on the form of this “least biblical ‘biblical film’ ever," a full-bore $125 million epic that portrays the ark builder as a righteous, yet increasingly deranged environmentalist who believes God wants him to save the animals and wipe out all of humanity in the looming cataclysmic flood. Aronofsky’s passion often feels as mad and misdirected as Noah’s, but there’s nothing more strangely exhilarating than a great filmmaker swinging for the fences with every creative decision. 

Some of Aronofsky's bold ideas elicit unintentional chuckles (e.g. the fallen angels who have assumed the form of giant rock creatures), but these missteps are occasionally more fascinating than the elements that work. There's nothing arbitrary about this. Aronofsky isn't just flinging wild ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. He's taking a mystical, non-denominational approach to this biblical tale as a means of portraying faith and righteousness — in all its forms and creeds — run amok. It’s overwrought and exhausting, but it's never boring like the bloated biblical epics that came before it.

The $68,000 wonder that started it all. Aronofsky cobbled together $100 donations from his friends and family to finance this harrowing paranoid thriller about a mathematician, Max (Sean Gullette), obsessed with identifying the numerical pattern that governs the universe. Aronofsky’s budgetary limitations work in his favor; he gets in tight with his protagonist, amplifying the insular, mind-breaking nature of his hubristic pursuit. As Max’s life collapses, Aronofsky ramps up the visual and aural intensity; the sound design blends with Clint Mansell’s pulsating score to drive the viewer every bit as batty as the film’s wayward genius. 

As is true of most films centered on deteriorating psyches, “Pi” is a movie you admire more than savor. Aronofsky means to rattle us; we’re on Max’s wavelength every step of the way, which means we come to understand, if only on an emotional level, the logic of his mounting illogic. Cinematically, this is a remarkable accomplishment for a first-time filmmaker. But as in Aronofsky’s follow-up, “Requiem for a Dream," we spend the hellish final chunk of the film desperate to tap out. 

Aronofsky’s balletic body horror stars Natalie Portman as a gifted dancer driven to physical and mental extremes in the pursuit of artistic transcendence. She’s a classic Aronofsky protagonist: clearly brilliant but fiercely determined to rise above mere flesh-and-blood greatness. The ascetic physical demands of a top-flight ballet company have been brutally depicted before, but Aronofsky subjects Portman to increasingly surreal maladies that suggest she is literally turning into the Black Swan herself.

Aronofsky generally keeps the camera in close quarters with Portman, and she responds with an astonishingly vulnerable, career-best performance that earned her a Best Actress Oscar. Much is made of Aronofsky’s technical virtuosity, but he is especially adept at guiding his actors through physically/psychologically perilous roles. This requires a tremendous degree of trust between the director and the performer, and he must be a sensitive, respectful collaborator because the best actors in the business today keep lining up to work with him.

After pouring six years of his life into his first studio-backed passion project (“The Fountain”), Aronofsky stripped it all down for this brutally gritty character study of an aging professional wrestler (Mickey Rourke) whose body and soul can’t take much more punishment. For non-wrestling fans, Aronofsky’s film offers unsparing insight into the debilitating physical toll a life in the ring takes on these “fake” gladiators. They bleed for real, break bones for real and, in one outrageous “extreme” bout," they get stapled in the head for real.

“The Wrestler” is an unusually understated entry in Aronofsky’s oeuvre. Though it’s plenty violent, it presents Rourke’s frequently self-inflicted wounds as depressingly matter-of-fact; even when he spitefully shoves his hand into a deli slicer, we don’t feel the fight-or-flight response we experience at the end of “Pi” or “Requiem for a Dream." Though Rourke’s character is flawed and has brought most of his misery on himself, we’re rooting for him to turn it around. In a rare humanistic gesture, Aronofsky grants his protagonist one final moment of grace. This is a beautiful movie.

In this relentlessly bleak adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel, Aronofsky’s characters are addicted to heroin, diet pills and the lie that is the American Dream — and they recklessly chase these highs until they splatter all over rock bottom. It feels like Aronofsky was determined to make the most mentally scarring downward spiral movie ever made, and in terms of no-hope, “make it stop” narratives, it’s in the same league as David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers," Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the first 40 minutes of Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible." This movie’s a runaway train of despair and self-destruction, and the climactic crash lasts a seeming eternity.

While “Pi” was a shockingly assured first movie (particularly given its budget), “Requeim for a Dream” finds Aronofsky basically fully formed as a filmmaker. His hyperkinetic use of montages to convey the rush of heroin recalls Scorsese, P.T. Anderson and Danny Boyle, but there’s an increasingly sinister edge to these sequences that is quintessentially Aronofsky. It’s an extraordinary thing to behold, but as with “Pi,” you’re in no hurry to revisit it once it’s over. You don’t need to. Those images are forever seared in your memory.

Aronofsky unbound. Easily the most daringly bonkers (i.e. uncommercial) movie to come out of a major studio in ages, “mother!” is a portrait of the artist as a deeply screwed-up and cruelly manipulative human being — at least, that’s where it seems to be headed at first. The narrative’s overt symbolism — e.g. characters bearing archetypal names such as “mother," “man," “woman” and “Him” — tricks you into a snap reading of the escalating madness. But just when you think you have it all figured out, it resets itself and goes sailing off the rails all over again. Aronofsky has stated that the film is “a psychological freak-out” that shouldn’t be “overexplained," but there’s simply too much going on here to accept it as little more than masterfully orchestrated mayhem. 

Mainstream audiences abhorred “mother!” (it earned an extremely rare “F” from the polling company CinemaScore), and while an overall negative reaction was probably inevitable, Paramount didn’t help matters by selling the film as a psychological thriller in the vein of “Rosemary’s Baby." The film performed much better with critics, who were mostly thrilled to watch a first-rate filmmaker lose his mind on a studio’s dime. One of the film’s most vociferous defenders was Martin Scorsese, who raved that “only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture.” Whatever it all means, “mother!” is Aronofsky’s most invigorating (and rewatchable) film to date.

A passion project six years in the making, “The Fountain” was almost a $70 million sci-fi epic starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. While it would’ve been fascinating to see those two wonderful actors grapple with this material, Aronofsky’s scaled-down version with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz doesn’t feel at all like a compromise. On the contrary, it’s a soul-crushing masterpiece. The narrative effortlessly drifts between three stories — a conquistador’s search for the tree of life, a cancer researcher’s attempts to cure his wife’s brain cancer and a man drifting through space with a dying tree and his deceased wife’s ghost — without confusing the viewer or losing its thematic focus. It’s a deft juggling act.

“The Fountain” offered a striking tonal contrast to the nihilism that had defined Aronofsky’s work up to that point, demonstrating that he could put us through the emotional ringer in a completely different way. This is a movie about appreciating what you have while you have it and accepting grief. Life and love are fleeting, loss is inevitable and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. When Aronofsky works in this melancholy key, he’s one of the best filmmakers we’ve got.