May 17th, 2006
Review: The Da Vinci Code **
When it comes to film publicity, nothing equals The Da Vinci Code for such a long lead-in PR campaign. Even a year ago, Sony were trotting out almost daily publicity stories of dubious news merit (”Tom Hanks has ham sandwich every day of shooting!”, “Audrey Tautou delighted to ditch that Amelie hairdo for flowing Da Vinci locks!”). Ok, I made them up, but the studio publicity for the film has been a PR juggernaut, spewing out big, black clouds of news stories, in effort to fan flames of interest about the film. Factor in the release of the paperback in the US to coincide with the film and the recent plagiarism case in which a High Court judge ran away with himself and devised his own code and you have to stand back and applaud the wily PR skills, as you would an unworthy winner in talent contest.
While all this publicity has helped make every man, woman and child on the planet aware of the film’s release, it has peaked too soon and I’m sure I’m not alone in suffering Da Vinci fatigue ahead of Friday’s opening. Ahead of last night’s screening, and because we were discussing the book on The View, I read the book over the weekend so am recovering from an overdose of Dan Brown’s Grail story. This isn’t the place to review the book (and not three years after its initial release) but I’ll happily hold up my hands and say I’m somewhere between fussy reader who knows what they like and a bit of a literary snob. Why? Because I like to take something away from books I read, something memorable, and that I’m not a fast reader can be frustrating when you’ve waded through a piece of fiction that you leaves you unimpressed. On that basis, Brown’s book is badly written, clichéd, predictable - and at 600 pages - downright flabby. But it’s also a pathological page-turner, full of exactly what people want from a good yarn - intrigue, thrills, mystery, puzzles and ultimately what Christopher Hitchens calls “the exhaust fumes of democracy” - a conspiracy theory. One thing I knew the film would be capable of was excising the flab from the book, which consists mostly of Brown forcing far too much detail down our throats in an effort to show us how much research he did. He can’t mention a church in passing without becoming an irritating tour guide, giving the impression that he may have spent too much time researching the details and not the backbone of his story, but hey, I digress.
So with a fairly indifferent approach to an easy read, I headed for Savoy 1, knowing that Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) and Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) are on a Holy Grail quest while being chased by a crazed albino Opus Dei monk, the French Police and possibly The Catholic Church. From the beginning, everything looked just as it did in the book, but early on you notice omissions and changes to the plot, obviously to speed the action along. In fairness, the film clocks in at two and a half hours, so the changes were inevitable, but some just didn’t work and ultimately had an impact on the film’s pace. The Da Vinci code is a thriller, and thrillers must have a consisent and engaging pace. Not so the film. After an hour, I was still waiting to be pulled in to the story as it trapses across Europe, taking in The Louvre, French chateaux, London and Scotland. The film is a massive production - even the flashback scenes must have cost a fortune - and it is every inch a Ron Howard work. Howard, thanks to films like A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man, is more than happy to jump aboard the Robert Zemeckis ship of film-making - the blockbuster with a bit of cerebral action. But Ron gets it wrong. If you’re trying to reach out with a so-called ‘thinking persons’ blockbuster, aim for show don’t tell. Even Brown doesn’t explicitly utter Sophie’s connection to the Holy Grail - but Hanks’ character does, in an excruciatingly bad scene that elicited laughter from the Savoy crowd. Another misstep was the music, the kind of over-zealous heart-tug-versus-danger string stuff that props up many a Hollywood effort. It invaded every scene, often invoking the wrong mood and ruining key moments.
The casting was strong with Hanks doing his usual regular guy routine (are those hair plugs?) , Jean Reno is excellent as the menacing cop and Ian McKellen is the perfect goodie/baddie camp aristocrat. Paul Bettany is a hair’s breadth away from typecast territory by playing yet another psycho/villain but he was well-cast as the creepy Silas. The only error was Audrey Tautou, a more than capable actress who seems uncomfortable throughout and doesn’t manage any chemistry with Hanks. Maybe it’s the subject matter or the fact that this is such a huge Hollywood film, either way, she looks lost. The producers possibly picked up on this missing chemistry because the tentative romance between Sophie and Langdon at the end of the book is erased from the film. The film wheezes along, dragging its unimaginative script with it, relying on something akin to Leaving Cert. standard history to make the whole concept credible. Overly earnest dialogue (another Howard-ism) and clunky puzzle-solving scenes only confirm the film’s blandness.
Since last night, I’ve been wondering if people who liked the book will automatically like the film. Probably, if they don’t mind the changes that dilute the book’s pace being shoe-horned into an already jaded 150 minutes. If you haven’t read the book, you might find it entertaining while being constantly niggled by the fact that although it’s a thriller, it’s missing something, and given all the hype, that’s not just not good enough.
May 17th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
I’m one of the small minority who have not read this book. I opened it at one stage but never made it through the first chapter. I may go back at some stage, it is probably a good travel book.
I was suffering Da Vinci Code Fatigue months ago. The curse of the regular cinema goer is that when a film gets hyped up they tend to start showing teaser trailers well in advance of the film. I must have seen the same trailer for this film every week for a year (I’m not sure if I’m exagerating or not, it feels like a year. Longer even), with its overblown music and false promise of being the most important thing, in the world, ever.
Still, I know I’ll end up going to see the film. Just to see what all the fuss is about. But I won’t be in any rush.
May 17th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Bad bad book, thought it could have made a good film so sincere thanks for the review- my reasoning that the locations and the gamine Ms Tatou may make it worth seeing just withered. There’s no pleasure in seeing her look distressed for two and half hours, even in nice buildings.
I know we’re not going down the book review path with this but:
‘it’s also a pathological page-turner……’
Sinead - I’ll not let that little slip go. Even as a page turner it stinks. Not because dialogue seems written by a chimp or the many other reasons one could give but because of the deadeningly mechanical nature of the thing: every clump of thirty pages or so are identical- our heroes yap and find a clue, cut to copper, our heroes read the clue aloud as the look-at-me-I’m-an-artist clumps of purpling narration point to the answer, cut to albino monk (!), cut to further narration as they limp toward the solution on the last page of the chapter.
In terms of page turners, something like Crichton’s Prey, though ludicrous, is far better- no fat on the fecker so it rattles on at such a pace you never notice if there’s an obviously repeating structure. Yes it’s filled with cliché and can probably be read by osmosis just holding the thing but it’s a genuine page turner. Brown makes the mistake of thinking his book is more than that and, as in most pulp fiction, such delusions are fatal.
May 17th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I thought it was important to read the book because it’s wrong to ignore such a cultural phenomenon simply on the basis of snobbery (and I can be a bit of snob about bukes to be honest). Like, there are two kinds of popular culture; the cool and cult - which isn’t really popular at all except in the sense that its expressed in the vernacular, be it music, film or literature - and the stuff that everybody likes, inc. Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code.
But you’re right, it totally sucks. It was obviously written as a putative film script from the on page casting of Harrison Ford and Sophie Marceau to the facile way every plot crisis is solved (and there must be about 20 of them) by the intervention of co-incidence and deus ex machina. That’s fine in a movie where the exigencies of film-making demand the suspension of disbelief. The audience is happy to accept co-incidence as a trade off for what would be otherwise be tedious passages of exposition (William Goldman discusses the idea that in a busy city, the cops can always find a parking space right outside the suspect’s house - imagine watching them realistically drive around for ten minutes looking for some kerbside real estate)
But in a book the shoddy plotting is really exposed as lame in the extreme. It’s also laughable how the book flatters the reader’s intelligence by presenting “puzzles” which you solve miles before the characters do - well maybe this is clever commercial writing because he subtly ensures the reader has little bits of extra information without making it too obvious that he or she has a slight edge over the glamorous and brilliant protagonists.
But my biggest beef with the book is the whole evil albino thing (and no, Silas’s back story doesn’t justify it - in fact it makes it worse). What the fuck is this about? You see it everywhere in books and films like this. Albinos are always evil and somehow inhuman. My favourite is the Nazi albino sub-category. And worse, everybody is totally cool with it. It’s like they’re a notch below what Americans are quite happy to call “retards”. What would Roy Orbison say? (And doesn’t it say it all that he had to dye his hair and wear those glasses to disguise his lack of pigmentation?) I won’t get into the fact that albino’s tend to have poor eyesight and therefore, even if they were supernatural hell-spawn like everyone seems to think, might have difficulty in, you know, going around shooting people with marksmanly expertise. Ok, I did.
Anyway, lay off albinos Brown. You wanker.
But if you have 90 minutes to spare, read the book, get hip to where it’s at right now, and despair.
May 17th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Fence: you’re right, the teasers have been around long enough for everyone to be sick of them - there’s so much dead-horse-flogging that the animal cruelty folk should be called in.
Colin: calling something a pageturner isn’t necessarily proof of its quality. I wanted to get through the damn thing and because it’s so overlong, you feel compelled to keep turning the pages, albeit for the wrong reasons, so that you get to the end.
Re Audrey, one of my brothers got all misty-eyed at the thoughts of seeing her on the big screen.
Copernicus - I was always going to read the book at some point. You can’t not read something that’s become, as you say, an intrinsic part of popular culture. It’s just been very near the bottom of my mile-long ‘to read’ pile but The View forced me to bump it up to the top.
There is no doubt in my mind that Brown wrote the book (and in the way he wrote it) so that it would be made in to a film.
The albino thing is inexplicable, why not just make him a monk? Or any number of Hollywood bad guy stereotypes? Heck they could’ve gotten Michael Ironside to play him.
Another problem with Ron Howard is that he never deviates far from the source material, so I’m wondering if ANY director/scriptwriter could possibly have made a silk purse out of Dan Brown’s sow’s ear?
May 17th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Steven Spielberg? Michael Mann might have done something cool with it - but it wouldn’t be too like the book then.
Are they both jewish? Would we then have the spectre of really upset evangelicals fuming that once again the jews have had a go at Jesus and are, like, you know, ruining christianity for everybody?
(I note I produced a grocer’s apostrophe during my rant. Oh the shame.)
May 17th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
I’m to see the film on Friday with Biology Class of 2006. I’ve not read the book but, although my 2005 NY Resolution was to not read it, I have recently considered picking it up for Copernicus’ exact reason. I look forward to seeing the film with a group of students who, on the bus back, will no doubt discuss its historical significance, or how true it is, or how brilliant the film was; given this opportunity, even premeditated irreverence is something I’m looking forward to.
Of those Debunking Da Vinci type documentaries, I’ve watched whatever I’ve come across. The best, and funniest, is the BBC’s The Da Vinci Code. David Aaronovitch, a personal favourite, features alongside some professors with brilliantly exaggerated accents, as well as that Leigh lad who sued Dan Brown. I’d seen Baigent (or however he spells it) through various media; having seen Leigh, one understands why Baigent is featured as a guest more. Leigh sports a handlebar moustache and motorcycle (not motorbike) sunglasses and throughout the interview, filmed in a studio, held his burning cigarette as centred to the camera as possible. No doubt, a brilliant, if fallacious, eccentric.
Anyway, the reason I mention this documentary is the mention of monks and Opus Dei. They had a good natured fella from Opus Dei on, and he remarked that the one (perhaps two, not sure) Opus Dei member in the book happens to be, “a crazy, killer monk.” He went on to explain that Opus Dei doesn’t have any monks, let alone crazy killers.
Still, a fun day out will be had, of that I am confident.
May 17th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Kevin I saw that BBC doco too, and the excellent Tony Robinson debunkfest on Channel 4.
Did anyone see the Late Late last Friday? Apparently Baigent was on as part of a panel discussing TDVC and had strips torn off him.
Leigh is the unlikeliest looking historical writer ever. He looks like Lemmy from Motorhead.
May 17th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Point taken Sinead, and wholehearted apology given- I had the same feeling when I caved in and read it, though I caved for less worthy reasons. I’ll happily admit to reading comics and not even insist on calling them sequential art narratives, but that wasn’t enough. I was being accused of being elitist so thought I’d better give in. However, as I was in Australia at the time, admitting you read it and thought it was garbage over there was akin to kiddy fiddling. It did lead to a trawl through page-turners to find a pure breed though, and it is alarming how many of them are obviously just written with film options in mind: that second Jurassic Park one was basically a film script.
The albino thing- makes the brain hurt just wondering how anyone could think that it was a good idea. Perhaps an international call for a moratorium on the use of blind or albino monks in fiction in now overdue.
May 17th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
I read the thing, and I’m glad I did, because I now know how crap it truly is.
It is a page turner, though. I found myself turning every page in the hope that it might get better.
I see Easons has a ‘Codes and Conspiracies’ promotion going on, with a set of DVC-spin offs, imitators and debunkers -all part of the same industry- under special offer.
Like others, I don’t like to think of myself as a snob, but I find myself wondering what sort of uncultured moron would finish reading the Da Vinci Code and then happily fork out more cash for Angels and Demons.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
Thank the Jesus. I’d only heard raves about the book from family members and now that I passed my comprehensive exams (woohoo!) after reading heavy-duty monographs for months, I thought I’d read some crap and let the rest of my knowledge ooze out the ears, so I borrowed the paperback from a friend. Didn’t expect it to be great, but at least I expected it to be vaguely exciting, given all the hype. I can’t even figure out why churches have their panties in such a wad. How can you possibly get so upset about such a terrible novel? Plot holes so big you can drive a truck through, and ditto on the preachy tour-guide thing. I felt my intelligence insulted every bit of the way. Codes? Jesus Christ, they’re f-ing anagrams and backward writing. I want those four hours of my life back.
PS This is the first book I’ve read where I actually said a little prayer that the movie would be better than the book.
May 17th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
I read an awful lot of shite - I am a veritable expert on Sweet Valley High books, and indeed have an entire Cupboard of Shame filled with everything from Jilly Cooper to ’60s teen novels. BUT I found The Da Vinci Code too badly written to read. It wasn’t entertainingly trashy, it was clunky. The prose caused me physical pain. I did wonder if the film would be entertaining because it would deliver the story without the bad writing, but it looks like it doesn’t even do that!
You see it everywhere in books and films like this. Albinos are always evil and somehow inhuman.
You need to read the wonderful Pirates books by Gideon Defoe. There is a very nice albino pirate in them. Also, they are the funniest things I’ve ever read.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
As I’ve said elsewhere, aside from the fact that this movie is based on a steaming pile of crap written by a cheap American hack, I refuse to pay money into see anything that has a lead actor sporting a mullet.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Why do I find myself thinking that there is no way that Tom Hanks could ever suit this part for the past months. Maybe I’m wrong but thats what I’m assuming. I haven’t seen the film yet because the delivery guy didnt show up with the films yesterday but I just hope that it does the book justice in some way, something that will be very hard to achieve on the big screen in my opinion.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
In the interest of promoting some diversity of viewpoint, I’ll own up to having enjoyed the book from beginning to near the end. I was hooked, intrigued, amused and generally gripped. It didn’t matter to me whether it was true or not, or really whether all the loose ends tied together. It was all stereotypes, so the albino one didn’t seem out of place. But I admired the skill involved in writing such a formulaic page turner. I don’t often read such books, though every now and then I read one to keep in touch.
All the historic stuff drawn together made me want to look again at the Last Supper. I wanted to visit a few of those places. All the while I was reading it, I felt I could understand why it was such a huge best seller: it felt like it was educating you and that’s a huge turn-on. The fact that I suspected closer analysis would turn it to dust didn’t damage my enjoyment.
It was the first time I’d come across the Mary Magdalen story, but I’d often wondered about her anyway.
Now, I’ll go to the film, expecting very little, hoping that there’s a big demonstration outside.
Thanks for your film review, and thanks for all the damning criticism. It’s good to go with low expectations.
May 19th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Interesting movie review Sinead. I’ll probably wait for the DVD. From the various clips I’ve seen from websites you seem to be right about Audrey Tautou being a bit lost or a lightweight in the movie(in more ways than one - she looks anorexic!).
I also agree with Shane’s impression - I can’t picture Tom Hanks as the right type for Robert Langdon - he needs some grey hair for a start!
I personally enjoyed the book for exact same reasons as Omaniblog - it does get you interested in learning more on many interesting subjects in a very easy to follow way - through the medium of a page-turning thriller. I do believe there is a lot of artistic snobbery coming from many who slate the book. I’ve written a blog on it today.
May 21st, 2006 at 10:43 am
Was mir am besten gefällt in der Uchronie, dass Jesus eine Urenkelin hat, ist nicht das Happy End. Wir sind alle UrenkelInnen von Jesus Christus. Die abendlische Menscheit hat es so gewollt , als sie im Name GOTTES die Hexen des Mittelalters verbrennen liess, um der Vater-Sohn Beziehung dem Vorrang zu geben.
Gut gelungen im Da Vinci Code ist auch nicht die Karikatur des OPUS DEI.
Wirklich gut sind die aquarellartige Skizzen in 3 Szenen vom Da Vinci Code auf die gleichen Plätzen in Paris und London. In diesen Szenen wird das aktuelle Leben und die Geschichte in Kippbilder wie im Realen Leben gemischt.