History Channeled

Tom Hanks goes global in the surprisingly adept "The DaVinci Code."  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Fun?  Oui.

The Downside: Art?  Non.

    Alexander Pope once wrote, "What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things," and the fact that the famous 18th century English poet makes a posthumous appearance in The DaVinci Code is pure serendipity, since his words could easily be applied to the fuss about Dan Brown's novel.  The novel- a pop-culture phenom in a time not exactly starved of such spectacles- since its publication in 2003 has sold more copies than just about any other book, second only to the Bible.  It raised eyebrows with its milkshake blender take on religious quasi-history, coaxing a thesis involving the mortality of Christ and the central role of Mary Magdalene in the creation of the Christian church out of a story that otherwise had little more to it than dusty old churches, dead people, and an albino monk. 

    Having apparently not learned its own lesson from the Book of Genesis on the allure of forbidden fruit, the Catholic Church's protests against the novel ensured its status as a hit while theologians fretted that the ideas Brown put forward would cause a crisis of faith in a world that is already slipping loose the binds of religious absolutism.  However, it makes you wonder if anyone who has railed against The DaVinci Code has actually sat down and read the damned thing, because despite its historian pedigree, it is fluff, a confection unlikely to make anyone question their choice in long distance service, much less their faith.  The fact that it is raising so much ire is almost amusing since the only people who have bought into the book's Heaven and Earth three-ring-circus are those who read the book in between writing blog posts on how F.D.R. orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor and why there were no Jews in the World Trade Center on September 11th.

    That being said, I'm not a historian and I'm not a certified expert on anything beyond The Simpsons and what time I wake up in the morning, so I'll leave the comic book fact checking to more qualified people who have a lot of spare time on their hands.  What I can say is that, from experience, reading Brown's novel can be considered a religious practice in how its lifeless characters and witless dialogue come as close to painting thoughts of Extreme Unction as any beach-time read is likely to.  Okay, perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but The DaVinci Code (the novel) is the epitome of function over form, technique over grace.  I wondered more than once why Brown didn't just write his ideas into a non-fiction book and spare us the lame attempts at thriller writing, but 60 million+ copies sold have shown how out of the loop I am.  And with the inevitable news that The DaVinci Code was going to be turned into a film, it seemed obvious that Brown's paradigm-shifting views on God and history wouldn't survive a transition to a summertime thrill ride, leaving behind little more than the chaff of a mediocre genre novel with aspirations (and delusions) of greatness.

    But it's a miracle of Lourdes proportions at how well The DaVinci Code (the movie) takes weak material and makes it dance.  Don't get me wrong- the story still runs like a Tinker Toy contraption whose ingenious capacity for finding ways to turn on itself are countered by its sheer preposterousness.  It's late at night in the Louvre when an old curator (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is gunned down by a shadowy assailant (I guess he took advantage of the Louvre's Cloaked Assassin All-Day Pass).  What does the curator do when he's safely barricaded behind security gates and dying of a gunshot wound and massive internal bleeding?  He writes enigmatic messages all over the gallery in invisible ink, including on the Mona Lisa itself, strips down, carves a pentagram into his chest, and then sprawls himself out on the floor in the fashion of DaVinci's Vitruvian Man, all part of a cryptic message left behind for his granddaughter Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a French police code breaker and visiting Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks).  Ignore, if you will, how or why someone would want to spend their last few minutes playing Fun with Ciphers, mostly because the spirit of The DaVinci Code is people engaging in practices that are ten times more convoluted than they need to be, reminding me of one famous Homer Simpson line (told you I was a Simpsons fan): "It's so simple, it's brilliant!  Wait, no it isn't!  It's needlessly complex!"  The message is the key to something called the Priory of Scion, a secret society (natch) of scientists and intellectuals who, according to the story, have protected a secret for two thousand years that could comprise Christian beliefs in such things as the divinity of Christ and the Divine Birth.  In actuality, the Priory was the subject of historical debate until it was proven to be a hoax in the 1960s, a fact that Akiva Goldsman's script accounts for in a classy "meta" move.  Of course, what good is a thriller about secret societies and falsified history if there isn't someone who's willing to kill to protect said secrets, so as Langdon and Neveu begin an ecclesiastical Easter egg hunt across Europe with the police in pursuit (Langdon has been framed for the curator's murder, which makes for an even harder whack with the disbelief stick than what the curator does to himself when he could have called an ambulance), they're dogged by the assassin, an albino monk in the service of a circle of clergy the movie takes great pains to show us are working way, way outside the purview of the Church.

    I went into The DaVinci Code expecting to be inundated by two and a half hours of the worst the novel had to offer.  What surprised me is that while the movie is far too timid to make any real shifts away from a mega-bestseller, it also manages to divorce itself from Brown's pat characterizations and pedestrian dialogue, and what is left behind is probably what The DaVinci Code should have been in the first place: a globetrotting popcorn opus with a master's degree and a few years short of tenure.  Ron Howard (Apollo 13, Ransom) has been spotty with his successes in the twenty years he's been a director, and it's always seemed as if he's a functional cinematic interpreter who lives and dies by the quality of the material.  With The DaVinci Code, though, Howard builds on top of the creaky foundations of the novel and creates something that's not great, not art, but a swift and talky buzz-cut of a film that feels both overstuffed and lean and muscular all at the same time.  Call it the blessings of creative casting- more than one person has scratched their heads at the idea of Tom Hanks playing an Academic on the Run like Langdon, but it is easy to see how quickly The DaVinci Code would have fallen asunder under the weightlessness of just about anyone else.  Hanks' gift isn't just that he's a great actor- he also has class, prestige; he's the ultimate Hollywood anti-celebrity, an antidote to the gilded slickness of a novel that was just about born with a "Soon to be a major motion picture!" sticker on its cover.  Hanks, in one of the movie's more deft departures from the book, plays the perennial skeptic to the revisionist conspiracy theory the story wraps itself around.  It succeeds beyond being an effective foil- Hanks is The DaVinci Code's lightning rod, grounding it in a core of credibility it wouldn't be able to buy otherwise.  Hanks' presence doesn't make the more strenuous oh-are-you-kidding-me plot lapses any less visible, it just makes you feel less guilty for going along with the show.  I shudder at the thought of what kind of disaster this movie would have been under the banner of a more greased-down, dolled-up Tinseltown love-child like, say, Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford, who would have turned the movie into a parlor room Indiana Jones clone job.

    This rising-on-the-wings-of-angels syndrome is the result of an entire line-up who carry this movie effortlessly on their shoulders.  Langdon runs to an old friend, a British scholar well-versed on such matters as DaVinci and the Priory of Scion, Lord Leigh Teabing.  In the book, Teabing was one of the most annoyingly underwritten characters, but voiced-out by Sir Ian McKellen, a thespian who could win accolades reciting dirty limericks, Teabing becomes the personification of The DaVinci Code itself, an overly-smart smarty-pants who at least doesn't  lose his mischievous nature.  Tautou, she of the the Audrey Hepburn-ish smile, tackles the role of Neveu, the female sidekick who usually doesn't develop any more beyond a smoochy doormat, and turns her into a glass-eyed stoic whose street smarts and common sense match toe-to-toe with Langdon's History Channel mind.

    Horward himself seems particularly ballsy, creating a visual text for the film that doesn't look anywhere near as polished or pretty as $125  million should be able to buy.  Much of the film is under lit, perfect for a subtext of secrets, and people, leaping out of the shadows.  When there is light, the stock has a grainy, washed-out look that, again, isn't beautiful, but nicely plays contrary to the kind of prepossessing sheen that would have done this movie in.  And Howard, more of a factory of creativity than I've seen in a long time, reaches back to his A Beautiful Mind glory days for an invigorating way of merging The DaVinci Code's more literary elements as historical scenes like the coronation of the Knights Templar or the funeral of Sir Isaac Newton blend into modern-day London and Paris.

    The biggest complaint, besides the silliness in its DNA, is that The DaVinci Code is far too afraid to be a pop-culture heretic and deviate too far from the novel.  It spiffs up quite a bit (robbed of Brown's ceaseless expository outbursts, Langdon here doesn't sound nearly like the putz he did in the book), but The DaVinci Code could have accomplished more than being an interesting social trinket if it broke down the story to the bare bones and reworked it from the ground up.  I liked The DaVinci Code a lot, but I also haven't forgotten this is a movie rescued, saved by its director and its cast.  Even Paul Bettany, who we last saw as the hostage man in a snit in Firewall, gives the thankless heavy role of Silas, the monk, a palpable humanity that's far more gracious than the movie's trappings.

    The DaVinci Code was screened last week in Cannes, and was met with a reception somewhat on par with that Christians received in the Roman Coliseum.  The DaVinci Code is too much of a lightweight to even come close to pleasing everyone, even in a blockbuster season, but even with its faults on full display it hardly deserves that kind of savaging.  It's a game, an in-living-color Trivial Pursuit match, just one done with wood-and-nails professionalism.  I don't know why it's become so widely scorned, save for the natural reaction of simple over-exposure.  I can appreciate heated debates about movies like The Last Temptation of Christ or The Passion of the Christ which have profound things to say (and questions to ask) about our state of heavenly affairs, but The DaVinci Code isn't one of these movies and wasn't meant to be- pitching it out for not being the sharpest knife in the drawer would be like criticizing a Superman comic for not being wholly realistic- and Superman didn't have Leonard DaVinci and Alexander Pope on his side.  B+

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