![]() Grandpa, it seems, knew some very 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 very moment flying on an airplane. Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer and also - Bezu Fache! - the murder victim's granddaughter. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policemen who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget. ![]() Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. The movie 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're doing and why.īriefly stated: An old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along. Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is above all a murder mystery. Tom Hanks as the symbologist Robert Langdon in "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes festival. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language - note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition - can live only on the page. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. ![]() Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.) "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. ![]() Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair? The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia - it only feels that way - but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation. Recent history - "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" - suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business. CANNES, France, May 17 - It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. ![]()
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