'Da Vinci Code' enters yawning

'Da Vinci Code' enters yawning

By A.O. Scott. Copyright by The New York Times

THURSDAY, MAY 18, 2006

CANNES It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. Recent history - "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" - suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business.

"The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's film of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation. The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia - it only feels that way - but part of the ingenious marketing strategy of Columbia Pictures has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute.

Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised. Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti- Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?

Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code" is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)

To their credit, the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair."

Such language - note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition - can only live on the page. To be fair, though, Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe lines of dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," hisses Audrey Tautou to Paul Bettany (who plays a less than enormous, short- haired albino). "He burns them!"

Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is, above all, a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along. Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop- romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to accelerate as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing and why.

Briefly stated: An old man (Jean- Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile, Robert Langdon (Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a policeman who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.

Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu (Tautou), a police cryptologist and also - Bezu Fache! - the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile, an albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.

A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the night streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, by way of a Roman castle and a château in the French countryside. Along the way, the film pauses to admire various knickknacks and artworks, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters.

There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.

Through it all, Hanks and Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.

Despite some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life. He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh Teabing. (I will give Brown this much: He's good at names. If I ever have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for sure.)

Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment, barking mad the next. McKellen, rattling on about Italian paintings and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers, who should be having and providing a lot more fun.

Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin book, is a marvelously absurd creature, and McKellen, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this - a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness - would have given "The Da Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller.

But of course, movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Christ or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema, such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case, Howard and Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness. So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.