Code blue

Rating: 6/10 (24 May 2006)

'The Da Vinci Code' was a big bestseller, not, generally, a sign of great literary merit. The author Dan Brown's method, as well as one can detect from the Ron Howard movie version, is to bombard you with arcane-sounding information about Christianity, the divinity of Jesus, signs and symbols, the Priory, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei, and of course Leonardo Da Vinci, who's woven in as an officer of the Priory and unifies the story, to a degree, because it begins with a murder in the Louvre (wasn't Da Vinci an artist? and doesn't he have a painting or two in the Louvre?) -- and to add absurd and quite unbelievable twists, in the interest of -- what, exactly? Well, keeping the story going, I guess. Some who read the book say it looks very foolish on screen. Yes, it does. One doesn't need to read the book to see that. One wonders if this movie will bury the book or revive it. Certainly with the libel trial in London and the pore-opening publicity about "anti-Christian" content, the book has so far done well for the movie's box office.
What's 'The Da Vinci Code' a story about, exactly? It could be regarded as simply a murder mystery, but it's both much more ambitious and much less successful than the usual detective story. Brown's revisionist account of the Council of Nicaea and claim, at least for the purposes of the novel, that Christ's divinity was a matter of general dispute at the time of the Emperor Constantine, and that Jesus started a blood line with Mary Magdalene, that this was covered up, that the Holy Grail is really a feminine symbol -- the blasphemy gets lost in absurdity and the tangled web adds up to very little, but it keeps Ron Howard and hapless viewers busy and befuddled for two and a half hours. All of this is too preposterous and silly to deserve to be considered a threat to anyone's faith, but the fact that Christians have objected to Brown's book and to its being made into a movie has been amply capitalized upon by the Hollywood promoters (See Frank Rich on the op ed page of Sunday's NYTimes -- May 21, 2006).
What happens? A guy gets murdered, pursued by a faceless monk, and flays himself on the floor of the museum. A Harvard professor and expert on symbols named Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) who's conveniently in Paris to give a big lecture (conveniently in English) is summoned by a certain French detective (soon replaced by the main detective, Bezu Fache, i.e., the trusty Jean Reno -- looking bloated, and wasted here) to help out with the symbolism of the cuts the murdered gentleman has made in his body -- and the story is on its jagged way. Clever Prof. Langdon may be, but he needs help, and it comes in the form of a French police cryptographer, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou).
Langdon and Neveu proceed to lecture each other through the rest of the movie, augmented by an old friend of Langdon's, Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McClellan, who shouldn't be here; but who should?), a sort of expert on the Holy Grail who's supposedly in search of that mythical object. What sinks the movie for any intelligent viewer is that it treats us as idiots. It explains the obvious and claims the most ludicrous absurdities to be true.
Brown's story demonizes the "prelature" known as Opus Dei, to a degree toned down, it's said, in the movie -- but Opus Dei in the movie still includes homicidal self-flagellating monks, most notably the albino madman Silas (Paul Bettany), whose use of the cilice, a way of digging nails in one's leg, is gruesomely illustrated in a scene that would appeal to any masochist and shows off Bettany's hunky nakedness. Silas comes in every so often to start up our pulses, which tend to die down with all the tedious explanations that make up the bulk of the movie.
Langdon is a professor of "symbology," which Walter Chaw accurately describes as "a malapropism invented by idiots so as not to confuse their flock with real words like 'semiotics' or 'epistemology.'" He's a debased -- horribly debased -- version of Joseph Campbell -- as if Campbell's unifying humanism were reducible to riddles and word games. The movie does a bit better with its monsters -- Silas, and a couple of initially kindly-seeming figures. But the screen-time belongs to the boring explainers, and Hanks and Tautou make the least sexy couple imaginable.
Reno's casting as a daring detective in a mystery involving murderous monks makes a kind of mindless casting sense, since he played the same thing -- in the person of the intrepid Commissioner Niemans in Matthieu Kassovitz's rousing horror-actioner 'Crimson Rivers.' The sequel, ably directed for visuals by Olivier Dahan but less well for character, also stars Reno as Niemans and is full of FACELESS, HOMICIDAL MONKS. Either of the 'Crimson Rivers' films provides five times the satisfaction of the talky, absurd 'Da Vinci Code.'