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Canon
Shot THE DA VINCI CODE: Directed by Ron Howard. Written by Akiva Goldsman. Produced by Brian Glazer. Cinematography by Salvatore Totino. Music by Hans Zimmer. Starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tatou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Paul Bettany and Jean Reno. Columbia Pictures, 2006. PG-13. 149 minutes.
Moviegoers, fickle to begin with, care deeply about their books. When Bewitched bombed, it slipped silently into oblivion, where only the bored or idly curious might follow. But when Neil Jordan cast Tom Cruise as Lestat in Interview With a Vampire (1994), Anne Rice came forward with her knives out, thus breathing new life into the theory that adapting fiction into film is a dicey proposition. The Da Vinci Code, its literary merit aside, is not your average novel. As of this month, 60 million copies are in print, although a better measure of success, to me, is the volume of parody it continues to generate. (The Dick Cheney Code is worth looking at, but you didn't hear it from me.) The book tapped into both a desire for spiritual meaning and an obsession with unearthing conspiracies, and it became a publishing sensation. Fortunately for fans of The Da Vinci Code, the movie is remarkably faithful to the book. Apart from two or three notable exceptions — Captain Fache's motivation and some details near the end — the movie is close to a page-by-page adaptation. Unfortunately for filmgoers, however, the movie is remarkably faithful to the book, and it suffers from the same afflictions as the novel. No code is too ancient or too difficult to solve; no corner is too small to hide in. It's all very tidy. It works as long as you don't think too much, given that 80 percent of the action — chases and escapes from Paris to London — takes place over the course of one very long night. As with the book, the nexus of authority is Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a hunky Harvard professor of symbology. Proving the old adage that you can take the professor out of Harvard but not the Harvard out of the professor, Langdon narrates the history of the conspiracy while he's not being shot at or otherwise intruded upon. His pupil is agent Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tatou), a natural code-breaker and runway model. (Okay, the last part isn't true, but if cops in Paris resemble Tatou, I need to renew my passport.) Neveu's grandfather, murdered at the outset of the movie, leaves behind a series of codes inspired by the work of Leonardo da Vinci. The codes point to a remarkable secret: Jesus married and had a daughter, giving him a bloodline that exists to this day. Neither Opus Dei (the bad guys) or the Priory of Scion (the good guys) wants this revelation to be public, but everyone wants the documents to corroborate it. Langdon and Neveu have no chemistry to speak of, nor did they in the book. Theirs is strictly a teacher-pupil relationship. Alfred Molina looks lost as Bishop Aringarosa, but the travesty here is Paul Bettany, who's been cast as the "hulking albino" monk Silas but resembles a Swedish tennis player instead. I don't know which was worse: listening to Bettany's faux-peasant Italian accent or watching him earn a large sum of money for essentially getting his hair bleached. Were there no actual albino men available? The movie's payoff arrives in the form of Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen), the only true eccentric in what should be an eccentric bunch. Teabing has the fortune and the expertise to keep the plot going — excuse me, to assist Langdon and Neveu — and they proceed until Teabing, not unlike Boromir in the Fellowship of the Ring, becomes convinced he alone is righteous enough to continue. But whereas Fellowship adapted a fantasy classic, the Da Vinci Code movie is just plain fantasy throughout, and a long way from being a classic.
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