Review: DaVinci Code

The DaVinci Code has gotten blistered by both critics and regular people alike for being slow-podding and not very "thriller-ish". Most say that the book is better. Not having read the book, I can't say if I agree with the latter sentiment, but I certainly agree with the former. The biggest problem I had with the movie was that it couldn't figure out whether it wanted to be a mystery thriller, or a character-driven drama. It started out very much as a potboiler with murders and riddles and shots of mysterious religious figures. Then towards the end it tried to have us become emotionally involved with the personal and potentially religious development of one of the characters. Overall it just left me confused. The few "personal" developments sprinkled into the first half of the movie felt out of place and distracting, perfunctory if you will, and because of that when the "thriller" aspect of the movie ended about two-thirds of the way through, everything else felt anticlimactic since I had not bought into the "personal" side to the story in the beginning.

What could be the cause of this? The easy finger to point blame at would be the screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman. I'm certainly no fan of his writing. I thought A Beautiful Mind suffered from the same syndrome as this movie, with a beginning "thriller" story giving way halfway through to a rather limp emotional story. Some of his earlier films include the much derided Batman Forever and Batman & Robin movies, as well as the hammy Lost in Space. I thought the writing was one of the weaker parts of I, Robot too. So all in all it would make sense that I didn't like this movie. Then again, in the labyrinthian way that movies are actually made in the Hollywood system, the amount of power that an individual screenwriter holds over the ultimate movie is pretty minimal. Shadow writers are brought in all the time to rewrite scripts behind the scenes, and even when they aren't, directors, producers, and studio execs can all bear down upon the screenwriter and force compromises in the ultimate script that can cripple a movie.

So I think some of the blame has to go to the director as well. I subscribe to the auteur idea of filmmaking, that the movie is ultimately the director's vision and that he/she should have full control over it. Certainly, Ron Howard has a good enough reputation in Hollywood that he could exert quite a bit of control over the final cut of the movie. Of course, if the director gets all the glory when a movie is considered a masterpiece, he/she must also get all the blame if a movie turns out a mess. In this case, the director is ultimately responsible for tying together the entire film to create a coherent story, and this is the biggest problem with the film. If Goldsman's writing was flawed, then Ron Howard should have had it changed. Also, the way the film was edited is ultimately Ron Howard's responsibility, and a better editing job and flashback-visualization concept could probably have sold the emotional aspects of the story better in the first half of the movie, and thereby made the second half of the movie more credible. Let's not forget that A Beautiful Mind, which suffers from these same problems, was also a Ron Howard film.

As for acting, I think Tom Hanks did as good a job as he could with some of the real clunkers that he was forced to say. Audrey Tautou, on the other hand, seemed like a fish out of water for most of the first half of the movie. I think this was mostly due to language issues, as she never seemed comfortable delivering her lines. Her inflections and tone of voice seemed wrong for the dialogue that she was delivering, and she also spoke pretty slowly, which hindered the delivery of her lines. It seemed like as the movie wore on, she got more comfortable, or maybe it was that as the thriller aspects of the movie dissipated and the emotional story came to the forefront, she got a better grasp of her character and her lines. In any case, it was not until the very end of the movie that her natural charm was able to shine through for just a little bit. Was this a problem with her acting capabilities? Is she simply not credible as a heroine in a thriller? Was it simply English language issues? Was it the poor script? Or was it ultimately Ron Howard's fault for not recognizing exactly what the problem was and giving her the direction she needed in order to succeed? Who knows. Sir Ian McKellan certainly had no problems with his role, so maybe the problem lies more with Tautou than anything else. As for the other actors, they were only given cursory backstories in the movie so they had relatively little to work with. For a thriller this was not a problem, but when the movie veered off into its more character-driven storyline this did begin to hinder things. I simply didn't connect with most of the characters.

Finally, all the belly-aching that was made about how this movie criticized Catholicism or even Opus Dei was a little bit overblown. The movie goes quite far out of its way to show that, even if this "myth" were true, it's only a few rogue elements that are involved. Opus Dei is not involved in the killings, but is merely used as a cover by some of these rogue elements. The theories that the studio may have stoked these misbeliefs in an attempt to generate publicity for the movie may have been correct, as I don't see how even Opus Dei, nevermind the Catholic Church, could be viewed in a negative light as a result of this movie.

Ultimately, because I had not read the book, I had an enjoyable time watching the plot, with its varied machinations, unfold. However, I can easily how if someone had already read the book and already knew all the twists and turns, they would be sorely disappointed with the execution of the plot.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it a 6.