So dumb the crap of Brown

Noel Vera

It would be tempting to consider "The Da Vinci Code" a kind of
corrective to "The Passion of the Christ," the kind of movie liberal-
minded Catholics, agnostics, or nonbelievers like to throw back on
religious wingnuts--sorry, conservatives--when they mention Mel
Gibson's snuff flick; it would also be tempting to think of this as
a sensational expose of the nefarious activities of the Opus Dei
(who may not be involved in any elaborate world-wide conspiracies,
but do display cult-like mind-control tendencies towards their
members)…but after actually seeing Ron Howard's latest opus, an
adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling novel, I'm forced to agree
with most critics: the picture is a sad, sorry crock of cow manure.

Perhaps Howard's biggest mistake--aside from accepting the
assignment to direct in the first place (or entertaining the notion
that he is in any way a director)--is in treating this material with
such reverence. The picture breathes portent the way a cheap horror-
movie monster breathes halitosis down your neck; the characters keep
reminding us that this is all part of the "biggest cover-up in human
history," staged to "protect a secret so powerful that if revealed
it would devastate the very foundations of mankind" (to quote Ace
Ventura: "Re-he-he-he-ally?"). Howard and collaborator Akiva
Goldsman (the scriptwriter of such artistically renowned films
as "Batman Forever," "Batman and Robin," and "Lost in Space")
necessarily trim some of Brown's awful dialogue--the airport
paperback edition drones for some 454 pages--but force the actors to
intone the surviving lines as if they were hallowed scripture. The
book, bogged down by Brown's clumsy prose and hilarious lack of
familiarity with (among other things) the Catholic Church,
colloquial French, and basic European geography is made worse on the
big screen by limping camerawork and the most laughably ominous Hans
Zimmer music score this side of Ingmar Bergman parodies. This isn't
filmmaking or even good commercial filmmaking, it's big-budgeted
finger-painting; if it's at all a hit that's because everyone
trooped to the multiplexes, curious to see what the fuss is about.

Turns out it's much ado about nada--I had to stand near the back of
the theater to stay alert, myself (the reasoning being if I fall
asleep the slap of the floor against my face would wake me up). Once
in a while there's a detail or two that amused me--Alfred Molina,
grinning like a buccaneer as he cruises down corridors of power, for
one; Paul Bettany libeling albinos (I hear they've been protesting)
with his sullen, staring Silas (it's not his homicidal instincts
albinos object to, I suspect, as the fact that he's such a gullible
dolt). Perhaps the single best performance in the picture is Ian
McKellen's Sir Leigh Teabing; McKellen evokes such childish delight
at each and every preposterous detail Brown includes in his
glorified Easter egg hunt that you can't help but be taken along--
you begin to think Brown may be on to something with his assertion
that Emperor Constantine declared Christ's divinity in the First
Council of Nicaea (actually his divinity is cited both in the New
Testament and in various texts centuries before the Council), that
Da Vinci was a member of the Priory of Scion (actually the Priory
was a 1950's forgery) and hid a woman among the disciples in his
painting "The Last Supper" (actually there's a tradition in
paintings of that time of depicting young men as beautiful and
effeminate), or that millions of women were burnt as witches
(actually it's more like 50,000 witches, a good percentage of which
were men, condemned by secular courts among Protestant communities
(so go blame them)). You feel offended when hapless Silas interrupts
the discussion by barging in; it was the most fun (actually, the
only genuine fun) to be had in the whole movie.

Less fruitful is the casting of Tom Hanks in a Tarzan the Ape
Man 'do as protagonist Robert Langdon, and Audrey Tautou as Sophie,
his zombie sidekick (albeit with slightly better-looking hair). The
two fail to display even a trace of sexual chemistry between them--
or was Howard too fainthearted to have "Sir" Robert Langdon jump the
bones of a descendant of Christ (something Brown himself felt no
shame in suggesting)? Worse, Hank and Tautou fail to follow
McKellen's lead in treating Brown's elephantine dialogue as the
nonsense it really is, played mostly for sly laughs; when McKellen
isn't around the picture and its two leads go splat. Howard at this
point would insert an action sequence or two to keep the audience's
attention from wandering--which should work, only the action is so
poorly staged and slackly edited you wish they'd stop running and
start talking again. As far as grail quests go, Steven
Spielberg's "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1989) has more
historical authenticity (it at least concedes that the Holy Grail
could be a common carpenter's cup), John Boorman's "Excalibur"
(1981) more visual beauty (a blindingly bright Grail floats down to
the seeker, spilling blood-red wine as it descends), and Terry
Jones' "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) more philosophical
integrity (the quest for the grail, the film suggests, has no end);
all three are a hell of a lot more entertaining than this slog.

Finally, there's the question of offensiveness: is this movie (and
by implication the novel) capable of undermining the tenets of the
Catholic Church's faith--or at the very least the Opus Dei? I find
that hard to believe. Brown's clumsy puzzles and bizarro versions of
history seem so haphazard and patently false--even for someone with
just a cursory knowledge of the church and of history in general--
that those saying it's a courageous attack and those saying it's an
insidious threat should be both embarrassed. The church is
responsible for many evils, from the Inquisition to the Crusades to
the persecution of Jews to the recent cases of child-molesting
priests; blaming it for a few deaths and the cover-up of some long-
ago scandal (so Jesus had some fun and kids, so what?) seems, well,
silly, to put it politely.

Mind you, I don't mind a good bashing myself--the institution often
needs to be taken down a peg or three--but this is a poor way of
going about it. The church, the oldest, most powerful organization
still active in the world, deserves a sharper, more honest, more
imaginative attack, not this hodgepodge of rumors and outright
errors wrapped in a pathetic excuse for a thriller. Luis
Bunuel's "L'Age d'Or" (1930) breathtakingly equated Jesus with one
of the four monstrous hedonists in de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom;"
his "Nazarin" (1959) pointed out the absurdity of good-hearted
priests, "Simon of the Desert" (1965) the absurdity of holy men,
and "Viridinia" (1961) the absurdity of pious do-gooders (you might
say much of Bunuel's oeuvre focused on the many absurdities of the
church). John N. Smith's 1992 TV movie "The Boys of Saint Vincent,"
with a tremendous lead performance by Henry Czerny as Brother Peter
Lavin, was a harrowing (and as it turns out, prophetic) account of
boys being sexually molested in a Roman Catholic orphanage, the
cover-up staged to hide these crimes, and the scandal that erupts
when everything eventually comes to light. Even our very own Gerardo
de Leon did his share, with great adaptations of Jose Rizal's two
major novels: "Noli Me Tangere" (Touch Me Not, 1961), and "El
Filibusterismo" (The Filibuster, 1962), both damning exposes of the
many abuses of ecclesiastical authority in the Philippines. "The Da
Vinci Code" isn't good history, isn't good criticism of the Catholic
Church, isn't even decent entertainment; it deserves not our censure
(that would be taking it too seriously), but our contempt.

(First appeared in Businessworld, 5/26/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)