“Rape of the Soul,” a documentary that shares Brown’s fascination with hidden messages in religious art, died at the box office earlier this year.
The da vinci code movies movie#
While “Decoding Da Vinci,” “The Da Vinci Deception” and other literary spin-offs from Brown’s novel are crowding book stories, movie spin-offs have not made much of an impression. Will the book repeat its success on film? Record-breakers in one medium don’t always cross over to another. His murder of a devout nun is especially nasty.ĭefending the film against Catholic critics, Howard has emphasized that the script is fiction, and Hanks has even distanced himself from the story by calling it “hooey.” But the mixture of fact and fiction invites confusion, especially when Brown calls The Priory of Sion (which is crucial to the story) “a real organization” that was “founded in 1099.” Biblical scholars have proven otherwise, and so did last month’s “60 Minutes,” which debunked it as a 1950s hoax. The movie may seem even harder than the book on Opus Dei, perhaps because Silas’ bloody behavior is so much more graphic on film. The phenomenal success of Brown’s novel undoubtedly has much to do with recent Catholic scandals, discoveries like the gnostic gospels and widespread disgust that the church is covering up for criminal priests. As the characters discuss conspiracies and anagrams and the hidden meanings in religious art, you wonder why they don’t seem to realize they’re on the run and they don’t have a lot of time.
Unfortunately, most of the other talking-heads scenes threaten to bring the movie to a halt, even when they’re supplemented by abstract, color-drained illustrations of ancient Rome or witch burnings or other phantoms of the past. The movie is most alive when Langdon and Teabing are discussing their opposing viewpoints and getting quite hot under the collar about the validity of each other’s version of Christian history. Teabing had the best lines in the book, and McKellen savors them here. Ian McKellen, who turns up about an hour into the picture, playing Grail expert Sir Leigh Teabing, seems instantly at ease with the literary dialogue. The pair keep getting into scrapes, escaping, then getting double-crossed. This touch of “Les Miserables” (with Jean Reno playing Langdon’s relentless pursuer) provides the story with most of its momentum. While they’re busy solving riddles, uncovering a conspiracy and avoiding entanglements with the police, they’re also on the run because Langdon is the prime murder suspect. He’s also hard to buy as an action hero who teams up with a mystery woman, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), to solve the murder of her grandfather - who dies in a spectacular, symbol-driven manner in the Louvre in the opening scenes. While Langdon is required to seriously present his account of the fate of the Holy Grail, you believe Hanks only when he claims that he’s been dragged into “a world where people think this stuff is real.” He doesn’t seem to have a passion for his work. Granted there’s not much of a character to play, but Hanks can’t help bringing a distancing sense of irony to the frequent discussions of art and religious history.
Instead, Howard picked Tom Hanks (star of Howard’s “Splash” and “Apollo 13”), a sharp actor who seems all wrong for the role. The script is crammed with information, yet there’s very little room for humor or breathing spaces or characterizations that are more than wafer-thin.īrown imagined his hero, Robert Langdon, a Harvard historian and symbologist, as “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed.” Indeed, the Ford of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” pursuing and protecting and believing in the Ark of the Covenant, would be perfectly cast as Langdon if he were about 10 years younger. A story that took 454 pages to tell simply cannot be telescoped into two and a half hours. Ron Howard’s skittish movie version, written by his “Beautiful Mind” screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, is so slavishly faithful to Brown’s plot twists that it's tense with effort. It’s the literary equivalent of the Kiefer Sutherland television series, “24,” complete with a shameless cliffhanger strategically placed before each commercial, er, chapter. No matter what you think of Brown’s revelations about the true nature of Jesus and Mary’s relationship, the book is a page-turner. Such is the case with Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” which has been a publishing phenomenon for the past three years. Yet if you place those ideas within a best-selling thriller novel (in which they are NOT presented as a fantasy), 60 million readers will applaud, and filmmakers assume they’ll turn up en masse at the multiplex for the movie version.
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