Little mystery in this mystery - what a relief

Rating: 5/10 (24 May 2006)

Is it sensible to make mystery (sacrament) into a theme of a mystery (detective story)? I doubt. The genres are too different. Take this fragment from the introductory chapter of the book: "The click of an empty chamber echoed through the corridor. The curator's eyes flew open. The man glanced down at his weapon, looking almost amused. He reached for a second clip, but then seemed to reconsider, smirking calmly at Sauniere's gut. 'My work here is done.'" This is how these nasty guys always act - the more so if they are albinos. They just cannot help it. In the next few pages you get a tall blue-eyed hero and a charming heroine, and there you go. But at a certain moment a character starts to lecture on some funny, pop-art sort of religion theory; and the more he dwells on it, the more suspicious you are that the author, unbelievable as it is, believes every word of it. You need not to know about what is said of Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls (nothing), about the "marginal" vote of 2 to 300 something at the Council of Nicaea, or about the Priory of Sion hoax. From the very wording of Teabing's exposition it is clear that nothing of substance is revealed to his eager listeners. Right, it is just a fiction. But the driving impression that the author is dead serious about it is, uh, painful. Perhaps one should take comfort in the line by D. B. himself: "'Pain is good, monsieur,' the man said." In the movie, the SF (Sacred Feminine) promotional sequence feels much less annoying. Who cares about a slide show when there is a fine car race before it and a villain jumping from behind the door after it? The action is perpetual, although it proceeds at a rather mild pace. This is understandable. It is not appropriate for a man of letters, like the main character, to jump from one sky-draper to another attached to a rope like Tom Cruise in MI3; neither one would show good manners if setting off a couple of rockets at a nice old château near Paris. The meek behavior of the characters during the action takes, however, does not imply that one can truly sympathize with them. They are, after all, but comic book characters. All in all, when factorizing out the pretentious "revelation" scenes, the movie is not that bad. A piece of respectable craftsmanship, I would say. The mechanical development of the plot may seem a bit awkward, but the emperor of the Andersen fairy tale, too, preferred the artificial nightingale to the real one. Perhaps a distant echo of beauty can be heard even in the sounds produced by a mechanical gadget. Producing Fibonacci numbers is mechanical as well but, as Robert Langdon himself mentions in the book, if you wait long enough (in actual fact, infinitely long) you will end up with the Golden Section.