Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Oh, my.
It’s been interesting in a traffic-accident-sort-of-way to watch the hubbub surrounding the release of this Big Giant Summer Movie over the last couple of weeks. Personally, I’m of the opinion that anyone out there who either (A) believes that this movie is fact or (B) believes that this movie is going to cause people to lose their faith should probably be asked to step out of the gene pool for the good of our species. This is a very silly potboiler, directed by a director with little or no feel for the genre, and getting upset because of its theological content gives it a weight that the film never even comes close to earning.
I admire the intent of the film. As an idea, it’s engaging, a literate thriller that ties in real-life masterworks of art with long-discussed theories about the origins of the Catholic Church and the nature of Jesus Christ, and in the right hands, it might have been fairly potent stuff. Incendiary, even. But Dan Brown’s book was very much lightweight airport fare, and Akiva Goldsman has made a fairly startling mistake in adapting it. Instead of embracing the giddy, trashy side of the book and playing it as giddy, trashy adventure, Goldsman took the book seriously and has crafted a ponderous, slow-motion thriller without thrills, an inaction movie of sorts. Robert Langdon, played by a profoundly-stranded Tom Hanks, is one of the most passive heroes I’ve ever seen in a movie like this. He barely participates in the events. It gets so bad that I started to expect that we’d see him carrying a camera to film the events, since there’s no other real purpose to his being part of things. Any comparison anyone makes to Indiana Jones in discussing the character is wrong, wrong, wrong. Indy is a man of pure action, especially in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, while Langdon seems to be a man who is not only slow to action, but incapable of it. He’s overpowered several times in the film, and during the big moments where the mystery comes together, he’s sidelined, uninvolved.
And, yeah, this year’s biggest unintentional laugh line comes from the very seriously intoned, “I have to get to a library.”
What makes a film like THE DA VINCI CODE frustrating is that it’s not terrible. It’s not incompetent. There’s at least one performance that is genuinely fun all the way through, Sir Ian McKellen, Lord Of Exposition. It’s his job to lay out the majority of the backstory, the supposed history that an audience needs to understand things. It’s a thankless role, especially in his last few scenes, but McKellen milks it. Audrey Tautou is adorable even in an underwritten role like this one. Paul Bettany does what he was hired to do. Unfortunately, what he was hired to do was play a villain that reads menacing on a page, but plays silly on the screen. I’m not creeped out by him because of his intense faith or his self-flaggelation. I do think people who say that Dan Brown vilified the Church in his novel are probably right. I don’t think he did it out of any genuine desire (or ability) to attack the foundations of faith, though. I think he just needed a bad guy for his book, and using a creepy hyper-devout monk assassin and a creepy corrupt bishop and some creepy church interiors seemed like it tapped into a general anti-Catholic malaise that’s set in over the last decade or so. The controversy, such as it is, really should be focused on that more than on trying to correct Brown’s history, since that’s the stuff that is less important. This is no more of an argument for or against the divinity of Jesus Christ than RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is a political manifesto about the God-given weaponry of the Chosen People. Yes, the lost Ark of the Covenent is part of the story of RAIDERS, but would you call that a religious movie? I mean, that film even shows us the Wrath of God close-up, and somehow, that’s all just accepted as the supernatural world that Indiana Jones travels in. It’s not thought of as “religious.” And that’s what this film gets wrong. This film spends so much time setting up the idea that whatever the secret of the film, it’s worth killing for, that it sort of hammers home that over-important pompous attitude. Watching THE DA VINCI CODE frequently feels like homework, and as much as I dislike the adaptation by Akiva “Big Surprise” Goldsman, I don’t think the film’s real shortcomings are his fault. In the end, I think Ron Howard was more miscast here than even Tom Hanks was, and that’s a crippling blow the film never recovers from.
There are things Ron Howard can do well. I’m personally a big fan of APOLLO 13, and I really love SPLASH and NIGHT SHIFT and PARENTHOOD, and every now and then, his sense of humor still shows up in his films. On those occasions, I am reminded of why I like Ron Howard and root for him to make a good film each time out. I really dislike “Give Me An Oscar!” mode Ron Howard, but then again, I hate pretty much everyone in “Give Me An Oscar!” mode, so nothing personal. And “nothing personal” is the problem here. I don’t detect any pulse in THE DA VINCI CODE. I don’t think Ron Howard’s heart was ever in this film. I think he made it because it was going to have to get made by somebody, and he figured it was a giant hit and sure, why not. Well, I’ll tell you why not. At this stage, Ron Howard’s got all the commercial credibility he’s every going to have, and he figures he should spend it when he needs to. He’s coming off a flop and an underperformer, and he needs to make something that connects. He looked at the sales figures on that book and realized it would be next to impossible to screw up. There’s a tidy professionalism to the entire enterprise, and taken in small bites, it’s entertaining. It’s just that it doesn’t add up, and there are things about it that, if questioned, tip over into being totally ludicrous. The set-up of the film, the murder that spurs the whole thing into motion, is one of the most ridiculous situations in recent memory if you try to make any sense of the logistics or reality of it. Works as an image, but not as reality. Howard tries to stage a car chase, but it falls flat, just like the three truly insulting “escape” scenes in the film. But having said that, I thought the first two hours or so moved with a certain propulsive force that was impossible to deny. It’s only in the last half-hour that the film finally slows down and really makes some major missteps. Anyone who complained about the multiple endings in RETURN OF THE KING is going to go mental as this film ends once, then again, then seems to end conclusively, only to turn into another long sequence. And even worse, the film sort of stutters, repeating itself, hammering home its “big idea” over and over. Howard tries for a transcendent visual metaphor to close the film, and it’s not a bad idea, but it doesn’t really communicate onscreen.
Even saying this much, it feels like more effort than the film deserves. It’s okay. It will most likely please its fanbase, and it may cross over a bit to become a minor hit. But considering how much muscle there was behind this one, the entire affair seems sadly anemic.
I’ll have an OVER THE HEDGE review for you later today, as well as much more over the weekend. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
