Cannes diary part one: 'The Da Vinci Code' review

Dave Calhoun offers his early reaction to one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the year.

May 17 2006

Film critics curious as to the current whereabouts of the Holy Grail were given a helping-hand by Ron Howard last night as his 'Da Vinci Code' screened to the press at the Cannes Film Festival on the eve of today's world premiere of the film on the Croisette.

Here's a clue: security guards at one of Paris' main art galleries should be on the look-out for any crazed critics being trailed by freaky scions of the Catholic church who wear traditional garb while dashing around France in Renault Clios and whispering murderous orders into mobile phones.

If ever there was a movie marriage made in hell it was that between novelist Dan Brown and film director Ron Howard. Brown's clunky, awkward prose is well matched to Howard's frighteningly earnest, spoon-feeding approach to cinema.

To his credit, Howard keeps his movie ticking along at a much more acceptable pace than he ever achieved in 'Cinderella Man' and if - and it's quite a big if - you're willing to ignore the monstrous perversion of the garbled historicism at its core, then you might even enjoy some of its wild fancy as it sweeps through a host of grand French and British locations - Saint Sulpice, the Louvre, Lincoln Cathedral, the Rosslyn Chapel, various chateaus - and tries to convince its audience that Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a well-natured Harvard professor of 'religious symbology' and Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a code-breaking policewoman can, over the course of about twenty-hours, uncover one of the greatest conspiracies at the heart of the Catholic church: a cover-up of the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, who, the film argues, together bore a child whose blood-line still survives in modern France.

It's all complete guff, of course, however compelling you may find 'The Da Vinci Code' as a middle-of-the-road film thriller. Hanks and Tautou sprint their way through two-and-a-half hours of relentless, ridiculous exposition and condescending explanations of the past 2,000 years of ecclesiastical history that would make a GCSE history teacher blush with embarrassment.

The script leaves nothing to the imagination as it attempts to make clear a plot that forever chews on its own tail and devises cunning get-out-clauses. It's buoyed along, though, by some fine character turns from Paul Bettany as the monk Silus, a ghostly and slavish follower of Opus Dei who favours a good bout of flagellation in the morning over a frothy coffee, and from Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabing, a wealthy, crippled dandy and an expert in the holy grail and the facts of Jesus' secret sex-life who always has a plane ready if Brown's plot needs to make a quick escape across the Channel.

Of course, only an idiot would swallow any of Brown's hysterical, magpie approach to history. This is historical fiction that fully indulges our appetite for conspiracy and willingness to feel disempowered at the hands of the past. The only good idea in the film is that historical orthodoxies come and go, shaped and altered by the ideas and the power structures of a particular time.

Of course, the film itself is just such a product of our own age, a time when we feel confident enough in Europe to stick two fingers up at some of the hokum pocum of the Catholic Church without really understanding or even really caring where it's coming from.

Is it a radical film then? No, of course not, and these ideas only float loosely around its pulpy edge. Most annoyingly, Howard utterly cops out from following through on his film's innate wildness when, at the end, it segues into sappy, comfortable territory and Hanks' character concludes, horribly, that if we can learn anything from his crazy adventure it's that Jesus was probably still a nice man. Thanks Ron. Thanks a lot.

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