Dir: Ron Howard

I haven’t read the book.  Or any of the other 263 books related to it, from ‘The Illustrated…’ to ‘The Truth Behind…’.  I haven’t played the board game.  I haven’t played the video game.  I haven’t played the game that appears in newspapers above the crossword and below the Sudoku.  I don’t own a ‘Hidden Rose’ T-shirt.  I don’t listen to any of the myriad CDs, from the pre-released soundtrack to any of the ‘Music Inspired By…’.

But here it is, the big bloated zeppelin of a turd hovering on the horizon of the summer movie season, The Da Vinci Code.  It is the first of Hollywood’s summer tent-pole movies (although, from a personal point of view, the term ‘barge-pole’ seems more apt), still ruling our box office, and brought to us from the stalwartly mediocre talents of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman, the ham-fisted duo who mistake sentimentalism with sentiment and forgo complex human emotions because Han Zimmer’s score will fill in the necessary emotional and dramatic holes.  These are the two talents (Ron Howard actually produces some excellent television; what goes so drastically and predictably wrong?) who kept fluffy, scruffy Russell Crowe lovable by personifying John Forbes Nash, Jr.’s socially disfiguring neurological disorder, which meant we could love the movie star and hate the disease, anthropomorphized in the erstwhile form of an English actor.  In A Beautiful Mind Paul Bettany played a psychotic delusion, in the new film he plays a nun-killing, S & M monk, Silas.  As I haven’t read the book, I have no idea where Silas is supposed to be from, but here he sounds like Tony Montana from Scarface.

But Britishness-as-malignancy in the form of Paul Bettany is not the only thing that the two films share.  They also share the same special effect.  When Russell Crowe’s schizophrenic mind starts working, animated figures and patterns dance like Special K tracers in the middle of the room.  The exact same thing happens to Tom Hanks when he works out codes.

We know it’s going to be turgid—like a distended colon after a dinner of fouled beef—within seconds of the lights going down in the cinema.  Ponderous chords alert us to the gravity of the situation and the first of many murky interiors is revealed.  Actually, it’s all pretty much sombre murkiness, except when a character telescopes a flashback by saying ‘I remember…’ and then looking up with glazed eyes (you can see them reading the ‘dot dot dot’ on the script page) waiting for the dissolve to kick in.  From then on it’s a mishmash of pseudo-religious hoo-hah that borders on the libellous, as Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou rush around Europe with a hobbled Ian McKellen.  And because it’s Ron Howard with a budget of hundreds of millions, you know you’re going to get swirling circular crane shots, spirally up into the flying buttresses as Tom Hanks has a perplexing thought, when a simple medium close-up would have done the job.  Blah blah blah.  I’m not going to harp on about historical inaccuracies and the artist licences with Art (Leonardo Da Vinci is simply Leonardo from Vinci.  It would be like calling ‘Sonia from Brighton’—who I met in an internet chat room—‘Mrs. FromBrighton’):  Channel 5 has already devoted a week’s worth of prime time to that.  It was just extremely difficult to care. It is a mystery with no mystery.  Even I, a hermetically sealed off Luddite with reflexive scorn for paperbacks sold in airports, knows that Dan Brown’s grail isn’t a goblet but Mary Magdalene’s womb.  It’s in the cultural ether; it has become a meme.  And what was Audrey Tautou even doing in the film if she wasn’t the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Jesus Christ?  The daughter offspring motif was made explicit from the beginning. So I guess it doesn’t really matter that the film is sloppily structured, that the climax comes, and then it just goes on.  To yet another set piece, which climaxes.  And then it just goes on. No.  The blockbuster success of The Da Vinci Code doesn’t rest on exquisite suspense or narrative intrigue.  The success is due to the compulsive collector’s need for a complete set, people who already have the Da Vinci baseball cap, have read all 263 related books, and are already booked on the Trail Of The Da Vinci Code group holidays this summer.

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