The Da Vinci Bomb
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Hollywood needs this film. Currently in a prolonged slump, the movie industry needs a film to do really well and reinvigorate the industry. Executives are starting to get worried: even Mission Impossible: III had a weak opening weekend. They have treated this one with kid gloves: trying to divert the religious controversy from picketing outside into the theater, and not showing the film to critics until just a couple days before (most of whom then panned it). But despite a solid attempt from director Ron Howard, and the normally good actors and actresses Audrey Tautou, Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen, they were unable to save this film from irrelevant oblivion.
A brief summary is in order, for the three people in this country who have not read the book: a curator at the Louvre is murdered, and a Harvard “symbologist” named Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks is consistently awkward and ill-fit for this role) is called in to investigate the strange symbols surrounding the body. He meets the curator’s daughter Sophie Neveu, and after figuring out the first clue, they are off in search of the Holy Grail, the secret the curator was trying to protect. The chase takes them from Paris to the French countryside to London to the English countryside. In case you were wondering, yes, this is essentially a glorified, religiously-themed version of Stanford’s “The Game.”
While the chase for the Holy Grail is compelling (meanwhile they are chased by the police and a shadowy Vatican order called Opus Dei), Dan Brown spends much of the book expounding his own feminist interpretation of early Christian history. He takes a great deal of liberties in presenting speculation as established facts. Granted, this is a novel, but the idea of including so much historical speculation-presented-as-fact in a thriller might have been a bad choice. At least he does not include footnotes, as Michael Crichton did in his last book. The book, for all the “pop history” and legendarily bad prose, was one of the better thrillers in the year it was published and a bona fide page turner. So one could hope that even if it were not intellectually compelling, the chase would be exciting and fast-paced. I will keep on hoping, I suppose. This historical speculation is treated with reverence in the film, with many a pause for explanation. The grand score only adds to the reverence with which these historical questions are treated by the characters in the film. The confused questions from Tautou are met with the worried conspiracy-theory-paranoia of Hanks and, early on, everything in the film makes sense, so one would think we could sit back and enjoy the chase.
Not so. After the first exciting scene in the Louvre, everything seems to go downhill, and there is little humor to carry the plot along. The chase grows tepid and more and more unrealistic. Hanks’ Langdon is far less witty than the character in the book, and there is no chemistry between Hanks and Tautou, even with the requisite cheesiness at the end. One of the unique aspects of the book was Langdon’s Mickey Mouse watch, and it doesn’t make an appearance here—too light for the serious, heavy demeanor of the film?
A word or two on the religious commentary: Many Christian groups, especially Catholics, are upset about this film, but Sony has done a good job of diverting protesting outside the theater into discussion inside the theater. The film, while certainly highly revisionist in its history, does not seem to be entirely antagonistic. It’s far better than Angels and & Demons, Dan Brown’s atrocious novel about the papacy, but certainly the complaints of Catholic-affiliated groups seem to have some validity. He accuses the Church of oppressing women and suppressing huge secrets about Mary Magdalene, as well as arguing that Christ had children; those are certainly massive charges. But he plays with history in order to do so, mis-portraying historical events like the Council of Nicaea. Because the film is based on such shaky historical foundations, however, there’s little chance of the film having any lasting cultural influence. Nothing in the film will cause it to be memorable in five years, especially the acting. Tautou and Hanks consistently under perform, especially the latter.
I am still glad that I saw the film, if only to experience the hype—and the disappointment. It is not a terrible film, but it’s not a great one, or even a good one, either. It had all the makings of a decent thriller, at least, with a book that read like a movie script, and a reading of history to legitimize the plot, as well as a knack of moving the plot along quickly. In the end, however, it disappoints. Hollywood will have to wait at least a little while longer for that blockbuster to save the industry, if there will ever be one. We, like the movie industry, might have to adjust to lessened expectations for our films.
