The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Sunday, May 21st, 2006
Directed by: Ron Howard
Cast: Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellan, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, Alfred Molina
Runtime: 149 min.
Rating: PG-13.
Trailer
Dan Brown’s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, is in essence a well plotted thriller that delivers quick doses of mystery, action, suspense, religious history, and hell, even a little romance. Say what you will about Brown’s literary merits or whether the theological implications of the story are legit, but The Da Vinci Code is nevertheless a real page turner - the quintessential beach book. That Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman turn an entertaining pot-boiler into an uninteresting and dull summer blockbuster amounts to an unfortunate disaster of biblical proportions.
Opening with a mysterious death in the Paris’ famed Louvre Museum, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is summoned by Parisian detective Fache (Jean Reno) to help decipher strange markings left behind by the murdered museum curator, Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle). After Langdon realises - with the help of the deceased old man’s granddaughter Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a Parisian cryptologist - that he’s being set-up as Sauniere’s killer, he sets off on a quest to uncover why the man was murdered and why the clues left behind hint at a great conspiracy involving the Holy Grail legend, the Catholic Church, the divinity of Jesus, and a fringe Catholic sect called Opus Dei – with their psychotic albino hitman, Silas (Paul Bettany). There’s no need to describe the plot any further. With all the hype and controversy that this story has caused – not to mention the burgeoning cottage industry of Da Vinci Code books proclaiming to refute or expand the claims made - I’m sure you’re well aware of the plot and its allegation that Jesus was not the son of God and that he married Mary Magdalene.
There are two types of people in the world now, those who have read The Da Vinci Code and those who haven’t. The latter will be hard pressed to understand what all the fuss was about. On the other hand, those familiar with the plot and the book beforehand will watch the film in utter boredom. The conviction of the film’s central premise is so thoroughly glossed over that it is nearly impossible to reach the same level of curiosity elicited from the novel. The power of the written word over the spectacle of the film image works because the images Howard and cinematographer Salvatore Totino provide are so drab and completely devoid of any imagination and inspiration that the final product appears as nothing more than a two hour television movie for Showtime.
Ron Howard is a competent Hollywood director, able to seamlessly jump from one genre to the next in each successive film, but it is plainly evident within the first ten minutes of The Da Vinci Code that all is not well with America’s sweetheart director. The opening sequence is meant to be establish the complexity of the clues and their relationship with Leonardo Da Vinci’s paintings, while at the same time trying to heighten the suspense required to keep the narrative moving at the pace of the novel, but what it does is murk things up, considerably. Due to the time constraints a film demands, every answer uncovered by Langdon is fired off so quickly that any notion of suspense is little more than an illusion, especially when that suspense hinges on the unlikely possibility of being caught by Fache, who is without a doubt one of the most inept police detectives ever committed to film.
Brown’s novel is heavy on exposition and utilizes the standard technique of people talking on endlessly on the subject matter before quickly applying a tacked on chase-sequence to keep the reader turning pages. Then, it does it all over again. In book form, it’s effective, if somewhat tedious; there’s a certain level of satisfaction and comfort in knowing what to expect near the end of the relatively short chapters. The film however is laughably inarticulate. The action comes off as cheaply formulaic and inane set pieces that are much more offensive to an intelligent movie goer than it seems to be when written on the page.
Sitting in the theatre I couldn’t help but be reminded of another film that compares with The Da Vinci Code – not in plot but with the controversy and the conviction of its ideas. That film was Oliver Stone’s JFK. With it, Oliver Stone took on an established and sacred notion that Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. His film lavishly laid blame and implicated everyone from the CIA, FBI, Cuban expatriates and a whole host of Washington insiders. It’s clear that Stone fabricated several parts of the narrative in order to get across a specific point of view and to cast doubt on the official policy in the mind of the viewer. In this he succeeded brilliantly, using the film medium as a stage for an argument made only stronger by his technique. Utilizing quick flashbacks to recreate the expository information, Stone immersed the viewer into the unsettling paranoia of the main character. Ron Howard had the same opportunity with his film, but where Stone succeeded, Howard fails miserably. What are we supposed to get out of the film? Are we inspired to leave the theatre with some sort of revelation that will spur us to enquire further into the mysteries and official doctrine of the Catholic Church and Christian theology? I don’t think so.
What Howard does is offer up a bland thriller of the highest order, without any sort of conviction. Howard creates scenes where characters just sit around and talk. There’s an awkward attempt to recreate what’s being said in bleached out and CIG-laden flashbacks, but what is lacks is a meaningful connection with Langdon, our supposed main character. His character is so empty that there’s never any real connection between the images Howard conjures up and the emotional complexities that arise. Other attempts to immerse us into Langdon’s code breaking prowess are relegated to the cinematic trick of highlighting letters and words that must be puzzled together, a trick that was subsequently pulled off in another Howard film, A Beautiful Mind. It didn’t work for Russell Crowe and it didn’t help Tom Hanks either. The fun of reading the book was trying to understand the code and piecing it together with the characters. Here, it’s done so arbitrarily as if it’s only purpose is to stall the next coming chase sequence.
All of this jumbled and botched directing aside, the film also suffers from the acting talent displayed. Tom Hank’s Robert Langdon is a non-character who’s only purpose is to decipher codes at breakneck speeds while expressing surprise at what he finds. It seems Howard and Tom Hanks should have spent more time watching the Indiana Jones trilogy to see how an academic action hero can be infused with character and pathos, without resorting to the clichéd childhood trauma routine, which in this case is claustrophobia resulting from a fall down a well. Even this isn’t used to full effect. Langdon is never placed in a scenario where his fear will be tested to the full limit, except of course if you count a museum elevator. No, what’s done is surround Langdon with a host of characters that either upstage Langdon, as is the case with crippled Grail expert Sir Leigh Teabing (a scene chewing Ian McKellen), or to blend into the scenery like Sophie. Silas isn’t allowed to exist as a living, breathing character, but instead as a mindless Terminator-like machine hell bent on killing Langdon and company.
There is one person who comes away from this fiasco unscathed. And that is Dan Brown himself. The book he wrote, while not a masterstroke or a literary achievement is wholly better in its insistence that the story it has to tell is important and that it should be looked into further. Sure it’s a cliché, but in this case the book is definitely better than the movie, and considering the level of talent involved in the film compared to Dan Brown as a writer, that is quite an insult. Visually dull, painfully long to the point of tedium, and lacking any sort of intelligent handling of the subject matter, The Da Vinci Code is a summer blockbuster that offends the viewer in the worst way possible: It treats them like idiots. Blasphemy of the highest order.
Richard X
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006
