The Maguffin ate the movie

Rating: 2/10 (21 May 2006)

I saw this movie because I thought I ought to find out about The Da Vinci Code before responding to the apparent nonsense people say is in it, and I couldn't read the book. I tried, the Spirit of the Eternal Feminine Wisdom knows, I tried, but I couldn't get past the first four words "Renowned curator Jaques Sauniere...". That's a real hook. I flicked over a few pages and tried to find some juicy bits, but kept sticking on redundant or ill-formed sentences and the odd bit of contentious assertion. Actually, it took an effort to open the book in the first place because the title is so annoying -- he's Leonardo, dammit, Leonardo. From a place in Tuscany called Vinci. It's like calling Rembrandt "van Rijn".
But many inept books make pretty good movies, especially rip-roaring genre tales: the Bourne series, with action chases in tourist destinations around the world is an obvious example of how to do it, and Hitchcock is the great granddaddy of the art (though he often abandoned most of a book he adapted -- what are The 39 Steps?). Ron Howard has a track record of workmanlike, slightly uplifting entertainment, at least, and should be up to the challenge of a page-turning novel.
Unfortunately, it is the ideas in the Da Vinci Code novel that are the source of its popularity. Judging from the movie, there is no plot as such, only a series of puzzles that Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu need to solve to move on to another picturesque location. The police and an assassin-monk, who talks Latin on his phone to a mysterious Teacher, are always hot on their tracks, but never interrupt the solution of the puzzle, there are some senior Catholic churchmen conspiring, but the main one is called Aringarosa, so you know you can ignore them, and an aged "Grail scholar" called Leigh Teabing (sic) adds camp comic relief and complicates the plot in ways I couldn't fathom on one viewing. Instead of action scenes, with Tom Hanks as Langdon emulating Cary Grant as the innocent caught up in a caper in North By North West, as you might initially expect, things stop, even when the police are almost there, for Langdon, Neveu or Teabing to explain stuff about the history of art, the Templars or some guff called the Priory of Sion, all of it neither familiar to most people nor plausible to anyone who knows anything about any of it. (The great joke about the "code" in Leonardo's Last Supper fresco is that the feminine appearance of St John is really an allusion to the idea, promulgated by naughty queer artists like Leonardo because the evangelist refers to John as "the disciple Jesus loved", that he was Jesus' boyfriend, a fact well known to art historians but scrupulously suppressed by pious critics of The Da Vinci Code. The last sentence has about as much to do with the film as a lot of the verbiage in the film has to do even with the alleged plot, just to give you an idea of what the film is like. Except that my sentence is more or less true.) There are, to be fair, chases, gun fights, and some reasonably nifty musical excitement, but it keeps stopping for all that talk. Only Ian McKellen, camp as Christmas as Teabing, manages to make the words entertaining. Tom Hanks as Langdon is plain wooden, and Audrey Tatou as Sophie -- there's a clue in the name for anyone who has read the Comic Classics Gnostics -- isn't made nearly as gorgeous as she needs to be, and as she was in Amelie. Their lack of allure certainly isn't the actors' fault (though Hanks might have drawn the line at his haircut), and quite likely not Howard's -- the decision to keep the "substance" of the novel in the movie was presumably the studio's as much as his, and was probably unavoidable given the hoo-hah about it.
And Howard and his team are at least competent filmmakers in a way that Dan Brown and his editors (if he has any) are not literary novelists. I did make it through the movie without too much pain and with only the odd inner groan. But the most powerful and moving part of the evening by far was the trailer for United 93.