I haven’t read Dan Brown’s book yet. That choice was intentional. A coworker handed me the novel a week before the movie opened, and I considered consuming it prior to the film’s release. Instead, I left it unchecked. I wanted to see the movie in isolation. I wanted to see if it could stand on its own two feet. I didn’t want the book to influence my thinking.
But a book influenced me nonetheless. Only it wasn’t Dan Brown’s book, it was the Bible.
I admit I’ve never read the entire work. I evacuated from organized religion long before I ever got through the heafty tome. I’ve formed my own opinions on God, Jesus and the gospels, using logic and reasoning as my guides. They do a decent job of guiding my life in all other aspects, so I figured I’d give them the spiritual workload as well. So far so good.
The problem with the Bible is that, whether you believe in it or not, your opinions about it will affect the way you think about about this film. The conspiracy arc is centered squarely on Christianity and there isn’t a moment in the movie when that fact isn’t abundantly clear. Because of this, it becomes impossible to separate the entertainment value of the film from the impact it has on one’s own religious beliefs. Much like how reading the Lord of the Rings can affect your viewpoint before seeing Peter Jackson’s brilliant films, having any knowledge or opinion on organized religion immediately affects your thoughts on Howard’s film. Yet unlike the Lord of the Rings, everyone has an opinion on religion. It is the one truly ubiquitous things in all of life.
I caught myself several times during the film thinking about my own opinions on religion. We’re aware at all times that his movie is fiction using fact as a base, and it feels awkward. We either want the movie to stray far enough from fact that we don’t have to take it seriously, or we want it to be prefaced by “Based on real events.” Instead, the movie does neither, choosing to squirm around in some middle territory that we find unfamiliar and strange. This movie takes itself seriously when perhaps it should not; it is similiar to Nicolas Cage’s National Treasure, but it lacks that movie’s carefree spirit and adventurous attitude.
As a film it’s mediocre. It is one part treasure hunt, one part conspiracy theory, and one part psychological thriller, and yet put together as a whole it has neither the excitement or entertainment value of those three. The action in the movie is substandard for a film shot in 2006, and often feels contrived and unnecessary, as if the filmmakers were trying to dress it up for summer audiences accustomed to seeing the White House blown up by alien death rays. Most of the movie’s dramatic scenes lack weight and impact; they are all buildup and not enough payoff. And the intellectual portions of the movie are explained in longwinded, boring, dialog-heavy scenes that patronize the viewer. To top it off, the movie strays into unrealistic territory even when dealing with the physical realm.
For instance, the opening of the movie involves a murder in the Louvre, where a man is shot in the stomache and left for dead. He then has the time and stamina to write hidden messages on several paintings in the building, hide a key, leave a message drawn in blood on the floor (in secret code, no less) and mutilate himself to depict a famous piece of art by DaVinci. Only a few weeks earlier I saw a similiar shooting when Tony Soprano took one in the gut from Uncle Junior. His injury was treated with much more realism by the creators of the Sopranos; his character fell to the ground and struggled to reach a telephone on a wall so he could dial 911 before he nearly died. Jacques Sauniere, the man murdered in the opening of The DaVinci Code, could have been Tony’s grandfather, yet he had superhuman fortitude in the moments preceeding his death.
Tom Hanks does about everything he can with the Robert Langdon character, but unfortunately he’s written so shallow and thin that there’s just not much there to grab on to. About the only noteworthy characteristic of the man, other than his near photographic memory, is his clausterphobia. The movie plays this up in a few scenes, but the forshadowing is never brought to a satisfactory payoff, and when it is finally resolved we’re left wanting.
The real meat of The DaVinci Code is not the manufactured chase scenes or the thin character development though, it is the treasure hunt and the religous ramifications that spawn from it. In this regard Howard succeeds as director, at least partially because he’s already had practice with A Beautiful Mind, the movie that garnered him the Academy Award for best picture in 2001. In that film, you’ll recall, Howard used a visual technique to show how John Nash could decipher hundreds of seemingly unrelated numbers and extract a meaningful code from them. The same technique is used in The DaVinci Code to show Langdon selecting the key letters out of coded phrases, or important visual clues from works of art. It’s not done as clearly this time around but it is still effective.
Howard also relies on a grainy, washed out lense for flashbacks and scenes of historical significance. It is particularly effective during one brief scene in the movie depicting the Council of Nicaea, where the Bible was constructed. Ian McKellan’s Sir Leigh Teabing has a very funny line when he describes this event, saying, “The Good Book did not arrive by facsimile from heaven.” That sort of dialog is certainly one of the reasons for the protests from Catholics and Christians around the world, as it reminded everyone in the theater that human beings have been, and always will be, the architects of their own orthodoxy
In the end, it feels like the movie tries to do too many things, and ends up doing none of them well. We can easily imagine a more adventurous movie might have turned out like National Treasure or Indiana Jones, or that a more thoughtful movie might have ended up like A Beautiful Mind or Presumed Innocent. Instead we get a film that tries hard to live up to its own weighty subject matter, but falls far short of the heavens.