A.O. Scott | The New York Times | May 18, 2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/17/features/review.php
It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some
kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media.
Recent history - "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of
Narnia" - suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is
involved, can be very good business.
"The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's film of Dan Brown's best-selling
primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing
more than its share of theological and historical disputation. The
arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not
been going on for millennia - it only feels that way - but part of
the ingenious marketing strategy of Columbia Pictures has been to
encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone
to see the picture until the very last minute.
Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus
and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of
Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised. Is
Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-
Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?
Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As
for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci
Code" is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take
longer to watch than to read. (Howard accomplished a similar feat
with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)
To their credit, the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman
(who collaborated with Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful
Mind"), have streamlined Brown's story and refrained from trying to
capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into
which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an
enormous albino with long white hair."
Such language - note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious
tucking of the "which" after the preposition - can only live on the
page. To be fair, though, Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe
lines of dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive
murderers," hisses Audrey Tautou to Paul Bettany (who plays a less
than enormous, short- haired albino). "He burns them!"
Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da
Vinci Code" is, above all, a murder mystery. And as such, once it
gets going, Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Goldsman have
deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful
here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists
and introducing others that keep the action moving along. Hans
Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop- romantic with some
liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise
be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to
accelerate as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing
and why.
Briefly stated: An old man (Jean- Pierre Marielle) is killed after
hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a
hooded assailant. Meanwhile, Robert Langdon (Hanks), a professor of
religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing
books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache
(Jean Reno), a policeman who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his
department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.
Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu (Tautou), a police
cryptologist and also - Bezu Fache! - the murder victim's
granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets,
which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of
Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose
bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), is at this very
moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile, an albino monk, whose name
is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion
pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself,
smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.
A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It
skids through the night streets of Paris and eventually to London
the next morning, by way of a Roman castle and a château in the
French countryside. Along the way, the film pauses to admire various
knickknacks and artworks, and to flash back, in desaturated color,
to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters.
There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's
conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that
time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.
Through it all, Hanks and Tautou stand around looking puzzled,
leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Hanks
twists his mouth in what appears to be an _expression_ of professorial
skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality.
Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up
in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of
worried fatigue.
Despite some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the
divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of
sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between
the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a
symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.
But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up
just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life.
He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh
Teabing. (I will give Brown this much: He's good at names. If I ever
have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for
sure.)
Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-
Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment,
barking mad the next. McKellen, rattling on about Italian paintings
and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and
his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers,
who should be having and providing a lot more fun.
Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a
Tintin book, is a marvelously absurd creature, and McKellen, in the
best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through
American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is
indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this - a more
acute sense of its own ridiculousness - would have given "The Da
Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting
Euro-thriller.
But of course, movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the
divinity of Christ or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema,
such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case, Howard and
Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Brown's book
with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions
about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull
sententiousness. So I certainly can't support any calls for
boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which
is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.
CANNES It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking
some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry
media. Recent history - "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles
of Narnia" - suggests that such controversy, especially if religion
is involved, can be very good business.
"The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's film of Dan Brown's best-selling
primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing
more than its share of theological and historical disputation. The
arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not
been going on for millennia - it only feels that way - but part of
the ingenious marketing strategy of Columbia Pictures has been to
encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone
to see the picture until the very last minute.
Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus
and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of
Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised. Is
Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-
Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?
Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As
for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci
Code" is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take
longer to watch than to read. (Howard accomplished a similar feat
with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)
To their credit, the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman
(who collaborated with Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful
Mind"), have streamlined Brown's story and refrained from trying to
capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into
which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an
enormous albino with long white hair."
Such language - note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious
tucking of the "which" after the preposition - can only live on the
page. To be fair, though, Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe
lines of dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive
murderers," hisses Audrey Tautou to Paul Bettany (who plays a less
than enormous, short- haired albino). "He burns them!"
Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da
Vinci Code" is, above all, a murder mystery. And as such, once it
gets going, Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Goldsman have
deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful
here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists
and introducing others that keep the action moving along. Hans
Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop- romantic with some
liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise
be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to
accelerate as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing
and why.
Briefly stated: An old man (Jean- Pierre Marielle) is killed after
hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a
hooded assailant. Meanwhile, Robert Langdon (Hanks), a professor of
religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing
books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache
(Jean Reno), a policeman who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his
department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.
Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu (Tautou), a police
cryptologist and also - Bezu Fache! - the murder victim's
granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets,
which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of
Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose
bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), is at this very
moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile, an albino monk, whose name
is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion
pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself,
smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.
A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It
skids through the night streets of Paris and eventually to London
the next morning, by way of a Roman castle and a château in the
French countryside. Along the way, the film pauses to admire various
knickknacks and artworks, and to flash back, in desaturated color,
to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters.
There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's
conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that
time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.
Through it all, Hanks and Tautou stand around looking puzzled,
leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Hanks
twists his mouth in what appears to be an _expression_ of professorial
skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality.
Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up
in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of
worried fatigue.
Despite some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the
divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of
sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between
the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a
symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.
But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up
just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life.
He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh
Teabing. (I will give Brown this much: He's good at names. If I ever
have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for
sure.)
Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-
Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment,
barking mad the next. McKellen, rattling on about Italian paintings
and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and
his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers,
who should be having and providing a lot more fun.
Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a
Tintin book, is a marvelously absurd creature, and McKellen, in the
best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through
American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is
indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this - a more
acute sense of its own ridiculousness - would have given "The Da
Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting
Euro-thriller.
But of course, movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the
divinity of Christ or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema,
such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case, Howard and
Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Brown's book
with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions
about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull
sententiousness. So I certainly can't support any calls for
boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which
is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.
--
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