Duh 'Vinci'
Dan Brown's page-turner makes for a far less compelling film
By Andy Klein
Given its provenance - Dan Brown's novel! More than 40,000,000 served! - it probably shouldn't be surprising that The Da Vinci Code had a blockbuster opening weekend. Whether it has legs is another issue: if not quite the total wipeout suggested by early reviews, it is nonetheless a film that only occasionally reaches the level of uninspired competence and almost never soars above. Rabid fans of the book will turn out, but it's hard to imagine there being many repeat viewers. Half will be bored by how faithful the movie is to its source, the other half outraged at its occasional infidelities.
And if you haven't read the book ... . Well, get prepared for lots of talky exposition - a cinematic sin that is in this case necessary, but, as it turns out, wholly insufficient.
As Harvard professor/symbol sleuth Robert Langdon, a miscast Tom Hanks looks more uncomfortable and confused than in any other role in his career; and uncomfortable is a bad mode for an actor whose stock-in-trade is relaxed amiability. Langdon - for the six of you who haven't gotten around to the book - is in Paris to give a lecture when he's summoned to the Louvre to view the fresh corpse of Jacques Saunière (veteran French character actor Jean-Pierre Marielle).
Not only has Saunière, the museum's curator, been shot, but, in his apparently extensive final moments, he has managed to plant a valuable object in one location, paint (with his own blood) two sets of clues around the gallery, strip, carve a pentacle in his flesh, and - for the (as the French say) coup de grâce - spread-eagled himself in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci's sketch, "Vitruvian Man." He apparently didn't have time to fashion himself an extra set of limbs - what a slacker! - but one must applaud his ability to hold the position perfectly through whatever death spasms he may have experienced.
Langdon thinks he's been invited to this little private exhibition to help interpret Saunière's messages, but in fact he is being trapped by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a law-enforcement honcho who is convinced that Langdon committed the crime. Luckily, our hero is warned by Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), who is not only a police cryptologist but also - not entirely coincidentally - the estranged granddaughter of the dead man. Just why Sophie is so sure Langdon is innocent is never adequately explained on page or screen; both Brown and director Ron Howard try to keep things moving too fast for people to notice.
Without giving away details, Saunière is revealed to have been part of the Priory of Sion, an ancient secret society devoted to preserving the Holy Grail, along with a passel of documents that, if exposed, could discredit basic tenets of Christianity - like Christ's divinity - and destroy the power of the Catholic Church. The Church, of course, would like this trove destroyed or permanently lost, while other players simply want control of it, in order to leverage money and/or power from the Vatican.
Soon Robert and Sophie are on the lam from the cops and from Silas (Paul Bettany), an albino killer in the employ of a mystery man known only as Teacher. The Teacher's other minion is the fanatical Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), whom I like to imagine having once been part of a vaudeville team with Bishop Apocketaposa. (Never mind.)
These two crazy kids confide in a crippled, fantastically wealthy Grail expert with the even less likely name of Leigh Teabing. (It turns out that Brown, an inveterate wordplay freak, constructed this moniker by anagramming the last names of two of the authors of the earlier bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from which he drew enough material to get sued but not enough to get sued successfully.)
On a sentence-to-sentence or paragraph-to-paragraph level, Brown's book is as badly written as critics have claimed. (He has a maddening habit of inserting bits of research trivia in the form of "Langdon wondered how many people knew that the word grail had no relation whatever to Greil Marcus" or "Not many people realized that Christianity took its name from Christ.") His characters are among the worst drawn I've ever encountered; after a full ream of pages, Silas and Teabing barely rise to the level of stock characters, which is more than can be said for the utterly flavorless Robert and Sophie.
And yet ... there is something to be said for its sheer page-turning power. Brown knows all the same tricks as Michael Crichton and Whitley Strieber, and he gets points for having the entire 500 pages transpire in one 24-hour period, nearly putting The Da Vinci Code quantitatively (but far from qualitatively) in the same ballpark as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. For two thirds, I couldn't stop reading, but the book overstays its welcome by about 100 pages.
Even though this kind of thriller is usually designed to transfer easily to the screen, The Da Vinci Code has several problems, only a few of which Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman manage to solve. The book is full of chases and escapes, but they are way outnumbered by long explanations of Christianity and paganism, secret societies, and the Church's suppression of female power - the latter perhaps representing Brown's attempt at being progressive. And much of this simply cannot be excised without making the entire premise incomprehensible.
Besides shortening this material, the film cleverly keeps things visual by using interestingly shot historical flashbacks to accompany the characters' spiels. But the word "accompany" suggests the problem: These aren't actual storytelling scenes but simply illustrations to a wordy text.
Much like the book, the movie is essentially humorless until Teabing shows up; and McKellen unsurprisingly steals what show there is to steal. He has more energy than everyone else put together ... at least until the plot requires his role in the story to make no sense. Tautou, whose charm was crucial to both Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, is given nothing to do; you can imagine the part being played equally well by practically any actress of the right age.
But it's Hanks who seems most at sea. He's the central character, but there is no character there; Wilson, his volleyball costar in Cast Away, was more engaging and fully developed. And this is not a part where he could fall back on his Mr. Pleasant Everyman persona. He looks seriously lost and unhappy to be on screen. It's as though neither Brown nor Howard nor Goldsman could think of anything to make Langdon more than an empty arm-patched tweed jacket.
As for the religious controversies stirred up by the story ... well, the mere fact that such passions could be raised by the mild, bending-over-backward-not-to-be-disrepectful "heresies" herein is a more damning indictment of religion than anything Dan Brown, Richard Dawkins, or Satan himself could come up with.
Published: 05/25/2006
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