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Saturday, May 20, 2006
Coming soon...
The DaVinci Fuss
Back when I was a lad, some Muslims made real arses of themselves over a book called The Satanic Verses. The book, it must be said, ranged from crude to cynical to breathtakingly beautiful to just plain incomprehensible. In short, it was Salman Rushdie unleashed. The West was rightly horrified when this book brought a death warrant for Rushdie issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself.
With The Last Temptation of Christ and The DaVinci Code, not to mention Piss Christ and the elephant dung Madonna, we've gotten a look at how Christians do when it's their faith catching flack. The answer is that Christendom, at large, does much better. Still, you can see by the bulging forehead veins that some Christians wish they weren't so damn civilized about these things. A useful antidote for those fearful for their faith would be to go see the picture. They would walk away reassured that a) maybe the movie doesn't cut so sharply as the book, b) maybe the book didn't really cut that sharply and c) the Dan Brown enterprise doesn't really measure up to the task of overcoming the faith that moves mountains.
It's worth noting that the purpose of the Dan Brown enterprise, at any rate, is not to destroy faith anyway. Its purpose is to make money. If you're going to write multiple books with the same basic plotline - as Mr. Brown suggested he does, in sworn depositions - you'd better have something exciting to drape over that skeletal framework. All that Dan Brown has done is to discover there's one large, misunderstood and mistrusted organization that pushes more buttons than the American intelligence apparat, namely the Catholic Church. Brown's earlier thrillers featured a hoax to prop up NASA funding and an effort to stop an NSA intercept program that makes today's news look like small potatoes. The books were nicely done and sold well enough. But then came Angels & Demons and The DaVinci Code and Brown found out where the real money was.
It's fair to note that Dan Brown's moneymaking enterprise has had some help from a literary culture that is anti-Christian and highly secularist. You can sense the frisson the dimmer lights among the literati - from certain Borders clerks to low-rent intellects - get pushing a book that will upset Pastor Brown and his reading group. Those who buy in might be overdoing it though. When Brown's conspiracy theory plots targeted the American government, he wrote formulaic techno-thrillers. Now that it's the Catholic Church taking knocks, there are whispers that he might even be thought-provoking. Fortunately, the smart set seems to know better than to embarrass themselves this way, but there are antagonists and defenders alike who seem just a touch too excited over this stuff.
If you have read Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, there is little in Dan Brown that is new. If you made it through The Island of the Day Before (and Lord knows I didn't), there's probably nothing new. The difference is that Eco wrote for the smart set and made as much fun of the conspiracy theorists as the typical post-modernist does of people of faith. Perhaps it was this nuance that spared him the outcry The DaVinci Code has drawn, but the uncharitable might suggest that Foucault's Pendulum was just rather more than the typical AFA member was prepared to wade through. Not that I would suggest that, but others might.
So, what of The DaVinci Code, the Movie? Like everything in the Dan Brown enterprise, it is nicely done, well-paced and not a bad way to kill a Saturday afternoon. As Roger Simon would observe, it's first-rate hackery, a sort of hackery that is both underappreciated and harder than it looks to pull off. But speaking of first-rate hackery bordering on being something more... the director was Ron Howard and he knows a thing or two about pulling these things together.
The DaVinci Code, the Movie is on an even smaller skeleton than the book, and even so the ribs risk poking out here and there. But judged as an adventure mystery, rather than high art, it ain't half-bad. Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou don't have the romantic chemistry that Robert and Sophie shared in the book - Hanks seems more older-brotherly - but there's a connection there that makes you root for the two of them together. Tibbing is a bit more cartoonish in the movie than the book, but the character is fun - you hope prison life won't be too hard on him. As for Remy, when he says he should have been an actor, you might have your doubts. But despite my initial reservations about the casting, the ensemble works as long as you think about what's onscreen instead of what's missing from the book.
I won't get into plotlines, either from the book or from the movie. I will note, though, that the questions the book raised about Christianity are watered down, especially in tone, while the closing dialogues - plus Tibbings' over-the-top the-truth-must-be-told bits - leave plenty of room for believers to exit the theater intellectually unblemished and free to follow the faith paths they were following. This is one time where we can truly say of a movie that points to controversial issues that it still is, indeed, only a movie.
The audience at the theater, too, seemed to treat it as only a movie. There was little in the way of gasping, hissing or oohing. There were a few chuckles in anticipation of plot twists that readers of the book were obviously waiting for - myself among them. Even the moment when Sophie Neveu learns the shocking truth of her heritage did not bring oohs, only thoughtful sighs - it's so nice that she's got some closure on that...
For those who are wondering whether to go see this, it is, as I say, the sort of first-rate hackery you'd expect from a Ron Howard-Tom Hanks production. Audrey Tatou is sweet and crosses the barrier from being "the French girl" into being a real person. And Ian McKellen makes a pretty good quasi-villain. If you are interested in the sordid secrets of Christianity, you're going to have to do the same god-awful source text reading I did in grad school. If you want to know about the dark rumblings that threaten to rend the fabric of our faith, you're better off googling Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye and Jesse Jackson. But if you're looking for an afternoon's entertainment and reading a book sounds like an awful lot of work, go see it. It's very nicely done, moves along well, the scenery is excellent and the background music swells in all the right places. For those of us who go to the movies for fun, not edification, it's actually pretty good fare. And besides, it's got to be better than Mission Impossible III, and you're in a lot less danger of funding a new Scientology center should you go to see it.
posted by gbarto at 6:02 PM
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