5/11/06

Zaki's Review: THE DA VINCI CODE

“If you’ve read the book, you’ll like it!”

That was the refrain I heard repeatedly over the past week from the legions of Dan Brown faithful when told of my mixed reaction to director Ron Howard’s big screen adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. So, if you’ve read the book, you’re in good shape. Fair enough. But what of those (like me) who haven’t read the book?

This in turn raises an interesting point when discussing books-turned-movies. At what point does the duty to be true to the book give way to the duty to make an interesting, involving film? It seems in the case of Da Vinci, it never did, and therein lays the problem.

The story tracks Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (played with as much of that twice-crowned Oscar-winning panache as Tom Hanks can muster) as he finds himself pulled into a continents-spanning conspiracy orchestrated by rogue elements of the Catholic Church to suppress the truth behind the fabled Holy Grail. Langdon is aided by French cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) as well as grail expert Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen), an old friend of Langdon’s who seemingly knows more than he is letting on. Add to this the relentless pursuit of a mad, self-flagellating albino Monk (Paul Bettany) and we’ve got ourselves a ballgame.

Now, when attempting to dissect a film such as this, already mired in both hype and controversy in equal helpings, it becomes necessary to separately assess its storyline, which in this case is already well known to the millions of readers who have devoured Brown’s novel, and its worth as a filmic artifact. Again, not having read the book (nor having any great expertise as a theologian), I find myself singularly unequipped to discuss the former, so I’ll try to concentrate my critique on the latter.

That said, I would like to note the controversial storyline which has so enflamed Catholic sensibilities. The film (and novel), posit that Jesus Christ had taken a wife, Mary Magdalene, and fathered a child, creating a bloodline that exists to this very day. This in turn, the story goes, has led to rival secret societies, one determined to wipe out any traces of this supposed sacrilege, and one determined to preserve it at any price.

First, it’s almost refreshing to see a religious controversy playing out that doesn’t involve Muslims in any way, shape, or form. Second, I have to say that I do find the entire hullabaloo a bit perplexing. Perhaps this is merely because the Islamic conception of Christ, as a man and a prophet, makes the notion that he would conceivably have had a family during his time on Earth something that’s perfectly within the realm of possibility. Just to clarify here, I’m not saying that is what happened, but the idea is hardly tantamount to blasphemy.

Now, rather than get into a theological he said/she said on this whole thing, I think it’s helpful at this juncture to just agree that Brown has fictionalized an interesting theory that has some recognition in academic circles and move on from there. So, having gotten any messy religious issues out of the way, what of the movie itself?

It’s always a perplexing situation when a film that’s as much of a no-brainer as The Da Vinci Code hits theaters, and belly flops so resoundingly on almost every creative level. This failure is made even more mystifying when you factor in the presence of an Academy Award-winning director, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, a two-time Academy Award-winning star, and a source novel that’s been a perpetual resident of the bestseller list seemingly since its inception.

And yet here we are, stuck with a movie that’s about as tedious and unwieldy as anything committed to celluloid. What should, by all accounts, have been a rousing, world-spanning, cliffhanging adventure yarn in the “Indiana Jones” mold, ends up being an experience akin to sitting between your two most pompous college professors, with the occasional token chase scene tossed in for the sake of variety. It fails the most basic test of any thriller: It fails to thrill.

Part of the blame for this may well fall on the essential un-adaptability of Brown’s labyrinthine original work (which, again, I haven’t read), but matters are hardly helped by Akiva Goldsman’s clumsy script. While he may well have won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, Goldsman will forever be the man who wrote the Batman & Robin to me. The problem here is that while Brown’s narrative, on its surface, has all the makings of a standard popcorn film, far too much of its structure relies on flashbacks and lengthy expositional monologues to give the story its depth.

And this is not even to mention the host of famous and familiar faces who parade in-and-out of the story, with little to no background or development to light their way. To be fair, Hanks and McKellen both seem to have fun with the vapor they have to work with, but in the end, most of their efforts are for naught.

While I have no doubt that a fan of the book will find it far less bewildering a work than I did, it’s that very pedigree that entraps the film and keeps it from becoming something truly great. In the end, The Da Vinci Code is about as suspenseful and involving an affair as sitting through a two-and-a-half hour college lecture on cryptology, with a Sunday sermon thrown in for good measure. C-

Blog: Zaki's Corner
Post: The Da Vinci Commode
Link: http://zakiscorner.blogspot.com/2006/05/da-vinci-commode.html