An Honorably Darn'd Worthwhile Dragon

Rating: 6/10 (19 May 2006)

Pop culture religious heresy is a pleasure only mildly guilty as long as it's done with reverence. Spielberg nailed this formula long ago with the "Raiders" movies & Ron Howard takes a pretty good whack at it with "The Da Vinci Code," or, "Dan Brown's Big Book of Renaissance Puzzles." Harvard religious symbology professor Langdon (Hanks) is brought in to consult on the murder in the Louvre of his associate Sauniere (Marielle), which features numerous cryptic symbols & clues left by the dying man in his last minutes. Police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Tautou), after learning that detective Captain Fache (Reno) is convinced that Langdon is the killer but knowing that the professor is not, helps Langdon escape. They can only clear their names by solving riddles deliberately left by the dead Sauniere & leading to the exposure of a secret society dedicated to preserving the hidden truth of the "Holy Grail," a revelation that would embarrass & perhaps destroy the Catholic Church hierarchy. The Quest for the Grail crosses the paths of Opus Dei official Bishop Aringarosa (Molina), his vicious, self-mortifying albino henchman Silas (Bettany), oily Swiss banker Vernet (Prochnow), wealthy, eccentric Grail expert Sir Leigh Teabing (McKellen) & an unseen, sinister mastermind whom Silas & Aringarosa know only as "The Teacher." Brown's convoluted tale is built around puzzles & selective interpretations of historical fact & legend, a challenge for a filmmaker since the viewer, unlike the reader, can't turn back the pages or put the story down until the movie comes out on video. Howard & Company get off to a strong start. Akiva Goldsman's script begins deftly, following the book closely without losing or intimidating the viewer. Howard's direction sets the tone darkly & tensely, not ponderously or somberly. Hanks is understated & terse as Langdon, much as Howard directed him in "Apollo 13," where he also played a stressed-out professional whose life depends on his skill. Tautou is strongly, heartbreakingly evocative of Audrey Hepburn, almost as if she were in "Charade" and her roles with Cary Grant were reversed. Bettany, Reno & Molina portray their heavies with even more sympathy than Brown let them have, one way in which the movie improved on the book. Howard & Goldsman do an excellent job of covering up the book's greatest flaw, which is the ludicrous ease of solving a key mystery, by keeping the action moving steadily & reducing the mystery's prominence. The film is still aloft when it gets to Teabing, whom McKellen makes his very own with a perfect mixture of self-important eccentricity, condescending intelligence and scholarly eagerness. As the clues unravel, so does the film. It goes on at least a half hour too long, passing one Oh-My-God climax after another, desperately throwing in more Western Civ puzzles like fuel on a fire. CGI special effects in the second half confuse more than illustrate, though they probably cost more than all those ever created by Ray Harryhausen. Perhaps Howard, like most other big-ticket directors, is no longer capable of telling a story without whiz-bang effects, or maybe he couldn't find another way to deal with Brown's concentration of so many difficult, confusing clues near the end of the story. For most of the movie, the action keeps the viewer's attention away from glaring holes in Brown's religious-historical background, particularly the flawed interpretation of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" which should be apparent if you can answer "yes" when Indiana Jones asks if you ever went to Sunday School. Unfortunately, all that baggage comes crashing down as the film approaches its end. Langdon's attempt to explain it away in a short speech to Sophie falls flat, tending, if anything, to negate the whole point of the bloody adventure they share. Despite several brief attempts, Hanks & Tautou never get to fully develop their characters either individually or together, another drawback of following Brown's story closely. Those looking forward to a chemistry like Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn or Gregory Peck/Sophia Loren will be quite disappointed. Despite the global furor, the Opus Dei order is not demonized, since the story clearly indicates that Aringarosa & Silas are operating beyond official sanction. Catholic characters in fact come across with a sympathy--sometimes even nobility--when the story has time for them, which is seldom. If the "The Da Vinci Code" is open to a religious criticism, it's a depiction of Christianity as a religion only fully appreciated by brainiac puzzle-masters. To that end, this reviewer has left you an anagram in the title of this review, made up of the names of two real-life people associated with this movie plus the name of one vital plot device. Like "The Da Vinci Code," it's best enjoyed without thinking much about any historical rationales behind it.