As I sit here listening to the Hans Zimmer's score for The Da Vinci Code, I'm wondering how to recover the hours of my life that were lost watching the film on DVD.
All right, that's pretty harsh, but it's praising with faint damnation to say that Tom Hanks was duller than dirt. Where the hell did that hair "style" come from? I know he can act, I've seen it, so what happened here? As for Ron Howard's "directing"...ugh. I'm not a big Howard fan anyway, but he's usually tolerable. I think his two most successful efforts were Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind. This mess is far off his usual game. For all involved, this film garners the question: What the hell happened?
And I haven't even gotten to the plot, yet. Wait, was there a plot?
Full disclosure: I was born and raised Catholic. My father was the product of a Jesuit education. I spent nine years with nuns as teachers, then one year with the Jesuits in high school, until I flunked Latin. My college degrees are from a Jesuit university. And yet until recently, I'd never sat down and read the Bible. Today I consider myself a C.S. Lewis Christian, a la Mere Christianity, which means that I accept the divinity and resurrection of Christ, consider myself a Christian, but I'm not attached to a given denomination of Christianity, Catholic or otherwise.
I am not going to take offense at someone challenging either my faith or the basic precepts of Christian belief. The core of a Jesuit education is that you challenge everything, including your beliefs and your faith. My father would run me ragged; Socrates would have been proud.
I've read the recommendation that The Da Vinci Code, the book, is best read as if it occurs in a science fiction alternate history universe. Read that way, you can ignore the legion of historical inaccuracies, never mind the theological misstatements, and enjoy a fun romp. I tried to read author Dan Brown's earlier book, Angels and Demons, and found it to be some of the worst writing on the face of the planet, with such a wild misunderstanding of science, the internet, and aviation that I never got to the religious aspects of it before tossing it across the room. I've yet to try and read his Da Vinci book, though I've browsed the highlights here and there. Brown's writing improved, but little else, near as I can see.
As for the movie, as adapted from the book by hack extraordinaire Akiva Goldman...ZOMGWTF?!?
Maybe I missed something, but even assuming all that is presented in the movie, that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene, they played bouncy, and at the crucifixion she was pregnant with His child...so what? It hasn't a thing to do with the divinity of Christ, and doesn't deny the resurrection at all. Yet everyone in the film runs around as though this would utterly destroy Christianity or, more specifically, the Catholic church. (Which is another whopper in the film, conflagrating the two, as if Christianity == the Catholic church alone, which I believe a few dozen other Christian denominations would find objectionable.) Since the central conflict of the film isn't a conflict at all, there's nothing to hang a much of a plot onto.
And I fell on the floor laughing when the film implied that the Roman Empire was somehow this benign, polytheistic political entity that only ran violently amuck when the monotheists (i.e., Christians) attacked and took over. Until that point, those poor Romans just peacefully worshipped the divine feminine and never mind all those thousands of years worth of invasion, conquest, oppression, slaughter, torture, and brutality. I imagined Hans Zimmer, as he was composing the score for Da Vinci, watching and listening to that scene and going, "Hey, fellas, a few years ago I did this other movie and, like, uh, it had a, hmmm, slightly different opinion about these Roman guys."
In short, the "history" within The Da Vinci Code -- what little that is comprehensible -- is laughably bad. It should have been a comedy, on a par with The History of the World: Part I. Instead, it's played with pompous, false sincerity. I kept comparing it to another recent film that romped through history, National Treasure. That film also played a little footloose and fancy-free with history but did so in a jovial, entertaining manner; it was thrilling and it was fun.
The Da Vinci Code is neither thrilling nor fun. It is pompous and obese, and as a result it's as dull as the day is long. Pretty much everyone in the film looks as though they're asleep. The action sequences are lessons in how not to do action sequences. The only trace of inventiveness is how Howard handles flashbacks, and they are especially effective when he layers them over present-day locations and actions. I especially liked how he handled Sir Isaac Newton's funeral as Hanks & Co. approach the cathedral, though a friend watching the film with me was thoroughly confused.
Zimmer continues the lessons from working with James Newton Howard on Batman Begins. That is, his score is relatively sedate, subdued, and nicely done. Excepting the choral bits, which are over the top, the music is the most emotional element in the film. Then again, I'm an unabashed Zimmer fan.
Alas, here endeth the compliments. I wonder if the film is as bad as it is because none of the cast and crew believed in the project. In National Treasure there's reverence and humility in Nicolas Cage's voice and acting because he believes, utterly and completely, in his quest. He is, in a word, passionate. Likewise, Tom Hanks is utterly convincing as the school teacher forced to lead men into bloody combat in Saving Private Ryan because he believed in the character, who he was, where he was, and what he was doing. Ditto all involved in making the film. There was passion on the part of all.
Here, in The Da Vinci Code, I don't think anyone believed a word that they were putting onto film, and it shows. At the end, when Hanks appears to close his eyes in prayer, you want to cringe. The entire film is lifeless, utterly devoid of any passion for anything other than, maybe, a paycheck. You could almost put a Dan Brown-like conspiratorial spin to it, that they deliberately made an awful film in order to bury The Gospels According to Brown. Too bad they failed, even in that, since Goldman is getting a record $4 million to adapt Angels and Demons to the big screen.
Oh, be still my beating heart.
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