THE DA VINCI CODE

by Kevin Koehler

Movies are the worst thing to ever happen to books, and not simply because they supplanted literature as the dominant popular art form. The conventions, clichés, and indeed, the very language of film have infected pop literature like a disease. Perhaps there is an incentive for authors to write "filmic" works readily adaptable for the cinema (and the easy money that comes with that), but I'm not so cynical to believe it's a conscious choice. Rather, the big and little screen have subtly come to define our perspective of what a story is, limited by the form by what we can see and hear. The written word carries no such boundaries, yet so many authors impose these boundaries on themselves. Books are composed as though the writer were transcribing a movie they've seen - a novelization of a film that has not yet been made.

I'm not sure when it was that cinema replaced literature in the mind's eye, though I imagine it was either of pop culture phenomena The Birth of a Nation (1915) or Gone With the Wind (1939). Besides being embarrassingly racist, both films are, with some irony, adaptations of books (Gone With the Wind being the best-selling American novel of the 20th century until Valley of the Dolls). Not so surprising given that a good proportion of early cinema was simply filmed version of classic novels, made for audiences eager to see events they'd read about acted out by characters made flesh.

Notoriously risk-adverse Hollywood has returned to its roots in a big way (not that they ever truly left, but still). Literary acquisitions, whether they be conventional novels, children's books, or comic books (these latter categories pointing towards the growing infantilization of the industry, but that's for another time) dominate the current marketplace over original screenplays. One can see the logic: as a blueprint is not a house ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is how Magritte put it), a screenplay is not a movie. But a book is a book, a completed article that works or doesn't work in a manner measured by verifiable sales, critical response, et cetera. Further, popular books have a built-in fanbase that original, non-sequel screenplays do not, one virtually assured to be there on opening day if you play your cards correctly.

There haven't been too many books more popular than Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, an entertaining but fairly artless weaving of conventional thriller, art history, gender theory, and Jesus that managed to be intelligent enough not to insult smart people (Janet Maslin of the esteemed New York Times called it "gleefully erudite") while dumb enough to allow dumb people to feel smart reading it. It is also a movie in book form, to the extent that future generations may wonder which version came first. This is assuming anyone from the future wonders anything about Ron Howard's lazy and pedestrian adaptation. Quite doubtful.

Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks, bad hair) is a Professor of Symbology at Harvard, where all the really smart people in movies teach. "Symbology" is basically a strange way of saying "symbolism," but this film (and, to be fair, the book) has a strange way of saying a lot of things. In Paris giving a lecture, Langdon is summoned to the Louvre, ostensibly to lend his expertise to the French police: the museum curator Jacques Sauniere has been murdered, and in the moments before death, left behind a number of bizarre riddles at the crime scene. However, Langdon is informed by rogue French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tattou) that he is actually the primary suspect in Sauniere's murder. Fugitives of the law, the two must solve the mystery of Sauniere's death while evading the French authorities, a killer albino monk (Paul Bettany), and others involved in a worldwide Vatican conspiracy to cover up a centuries-old secret involving our Lord and Savior, Jesus Harold Christ.

No, scripts are not movies. But books are not movies, either, even books written like movies, or, like The Da Vinci Code, so begging to be a movie that Random House released a version of it with 160 illustrations included within its pages. Perhaps Ron Howard was afraid to tempt the audience by altering, what is viewed by many, as unimpeachable source material. From a commercial standpoint, he may have been correct, but the filmmaking here is at times inexcusably awkward and clumsy (Akiva Goldsman’s dialed-in script probably deserves a fair amount of blame as well). Long passages of dialogue on points of art history that were tolerable on the page elicit chuckles when spoken aloud (even by actors of this quality). The thriller aspects of the picture are undermined repeatedly by these repeated expository asides - at immediate threat of capture or even death, Langdon always makes time to discuss the history of Rose symbolism, pagan gender theory, or any other banal academic concept necessary to the advancement of the plot (all the while diminishing our investment in it). Machinations that made the book a page-turner here are repetitive and tiresome.

As Landon and Neuveu are faced with many logical puzzles, director Howard is faced with how to visualize what is an internal thought process. Given the choice between obviousness or subtlety, Howard without fail chooses the former; the outcomes can be quite ridiculous. Paintings are analyzed by characters, for the benefit of other characters, using absurdly complex audio/visual presentations. A climactic sequence where Landon solves a riddle involving Sir Isaac Newton, where his reasoning is literalized in physical form (he stares at it while others stare at him staring at it) is particularly unfortunate, even laughable. Flashbacks, specifically one involving a pagan sex ritual, are likewise bungled with typical heavy-handedness. The score, as one might expect, leaves nothing to chance. No point is too fine to be made, then made again, and again.

Interesting footnote: The producers of the popular Fox television show 24 actually approached Dan Brown about adapting The Da Vinci Code as the storyline of the series' third season. The author rejected their bid (he did not see his book as TV) and would accept one from Sony, who produced this feature film a few months later.

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