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Nov 20, 2008 6:25 PM CST |
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Ron Howard’s film, The Da Vinci Code, which will spring upon the world in a simultaneous global release, has its world premiere here tonight as the opening night film of the Cannes Film Festival. All of France is already reeling under an enormous marketing onslaught. The Da Vinci Code seems to be everywhere—on the covers of magazines, in displays of the book in department stores and bookstores, in giant posters hanging in the Palais des Festivals here in Cannes. These posters feature the Mona Lisa. In one poster, she is wearing a sailor’s cap with “Cannes” on the rim, in another, trendy sunglasses. The TV Networks are filled with specials on the Knights Templar and Opus Dei. The Vatican, trying to figure out how to contain this marketing blitz from turning into a viral epidemic against the fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church, is pre-empting The Da Vinci Code with television programs of their own and by trying to reign in the faithful. They have found an unlikely ally in their quest to contain the faithful from deserting the teachings of the Church in filmmaker Ron Howard. The Da Vinci Code is a predictable, clichéd, over-hyped mess. It often veers close to kitsch, and despite the manipulative elements which are very heavy handed and obvious, it commits the cardinal sin of being boring. It undoubtedly tries to stay faithful to the book, but despite constant chase scenes and a fast pace, it is so weighed down with explication that it collapses of its own weight. It is, in a word, a dud. Tom Hanks, as the brilliant sought-after Professor Robert Langdon who, like Princess Diana, stays at the Paris Ritz, seems like he would have been more comfortable playing Forrest Gump in a sequel. To his credit, it is not all his fault. The dialogue, written by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, provides him with no character to latch onto. There is a weird attempt to ground that character toward the end of the film by referring to a childhood incident in which he got faith when he fell into a well, but this too, makes little sense. Rather than character development, it is just character clutter. Instead of writing The Da Vinci Code, Goldsman should have worked on a sequel to a film he wrote previously, I Robot. In The Da Vinci Code, Hanks is joined by French actress Audrey Tautou, who tries her best, but as someone described her, she is French like a baguette—generic. The wonderful Ian McKellan is the brilliant mastermind Sir Leigh Teabing, but even he is out of place here, because the whole cast is a hodge podge of actors working in a film that has no center, and careens madly forward for 2½ hours sheerly on the strength of its chase sequences and the overwhelming music of Hans Zimmer which makes you want to throw up. But Hanks, who is such a wooden actor anyway, and Tautou have screen chemistry that says if they sat down next to each other in a bar, they would never strike up a conversation. I didn’t read the book by Dan Brown, and after seeing the film I don’t intend to. To clarify the exposition, the film contains many preachy sequences in which Tom Hanks, and later Ian McKellan, explain to us the intricacies of the plot to preserve the secret that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that she was his favorite disciple, and that his offspring, in the royal blood line, still lives on in modern-day Paris. The Opus Dei are out to kill the protectors of Mary Magdalene's remains. It is these remains, which are the Holy Grail. When the explanations get too complicated, we are treated to cut-away sequences showing us brief glimpses of the historical moments—like the Crusaders attacking Jerusalem. This looks nothing so much as if Cecil B. DeMille was still alive today and working in sepia—in one word, phony. At the first preview press screening, The Da Vinci Code clones dressed in turquoise The Da Vinci Code T-shirts were there to do who knows what, stage manage the press screening. Though there was nothing for them to manage, it reveals a fundamental attitude to how the film was made: an enormous, bloated, global production, with parts of the Louvre recreated and paintings from the Louvre digitized and re-painted, shot on the James Bond set at Pinewood Studios. The Da Vinci Code is assembly-line filmmaking of a complicated thriller, an expensive property for worldwide consumption. It's like fast food. After consuming it, you ask yourself, “What did I just eat?” This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. Click here to read more transcripts.
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