The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : The Da Vinci Code is above all a murder mystery

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, May 27, 2006

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

The Da Vinci Code is above all a murder mystery

A.O. SCOTT

Film: The Da Vinci Code

Director: Ron Howard; written by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown

Cast: Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Juergen Prochnow, Paul Bettany, Jean Reno and Alfred Molina

It seems you cannot open a film these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. "The Passion of the Christ'' and "The Chronicles of Narnia'' suggest that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be good business. "The Da Vinci Code'', Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling novel, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation.

The film is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, who collaborated with Howard on "Cinderella Man'' and "A Beautiful Mind'', have streamlined Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his prose style.

To be fair, though, Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers,'' Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany, who plays a less than enormous, short-haired albino. "He burns them!''

Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code'' is above all a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Ron Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot, unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along.

Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The film does, however, take a while to accelerate, popping the clutch and leaving rubber on the road as it tries to establish who is who, what they are doing and why.

Plot

An old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile, Robert Langdon (Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policeman who seems grouchy.

Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer, and also the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some important secrets, which, if they were ever revealed, might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), is at this moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile, the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun. A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the night-time streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, with side trips to a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way the film pauses to admire various knickknacks and art works, and to flash back, in de-saturated colour, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father).

Also, thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code'' a jolt of mischievous life. But Howard and Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness. "The Da Vinci Code'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some violent killings and a few profanities.

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