Movies
The Da Vinci Code
Nonsensical retelling of the Dan Brown best-seller, premised on "the greatest cover-up in human history," namely the murderously guarded secret that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene married and multiplied. (The additional premise that the disclosure of the secret would have the immediate effect of liberating the oppressed worldwide and bringing about an epoch of peace and harmony, and that nothing would please the Catholic Church less, seems dubious in the extreme.) The movie is of course its own separate matter, and inasmuch as it's a Ron Howard movie it's pretty much what we could have predicted, something dogged, diligent, uninspired, overproduced, and crowd-pleasing or at least crowd-pandering. The grainy, color-drained flashbacks, ranging back to the traumatic childhoods of the two principals -- a symbologist and a cryptologist -- and back, back, back to the Dark Ages, Ancient Rome, and the aftermath of the Crucifixion, testify to the unwieldiness of the transfer from page to screen. The trajectory of the narrative is an odd, dash-and-dot line of breathless chase interrupted by long-winded discourse on religion, Church history, Renaissance art, etc., a high-speed quest for the Holy Grail broken off for pedantic exegesis of what the Grail actually is. Tom Hanks, even with longer hair, does not make a credible longhair. Audrey Tautou speaks English well enough to expand the market for her elfin cuteness. And Ian McKellen carries on in the grand tradition of stage-trained British thespians who have fallen in love with the sounds of their own voices. Still, the movie ought to be cut some slack for its abstinence from pyrotechnics, albeit no abstinence from high technology. And some more slack for its stress on the mental aspects of detective work, although even the code-breaking proceeds at a breakneck pace. And maybe, too, a bit more slack for its crescendo of rhetoric to a pitch typically in the upper range of apocalyptic science fiction. But that might altogether be too much slack for a movie with an acute predisposition to hang itself. Paul Bettany, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina. 2006.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: PG-13