Cracking the Code

Recently, I suggested that a good way to thumb one's nose at some of the more extreme forms of protest against The Da Vinci Code would be to buy tickets for that film whenever going to a movie, thus inflating DVC's box office take.

Unfortunately, I didn't plan on it actually not being a very good movie.

I saw the film tonight, and I don't think I'll be funneling any more money its way, "illicit" or otherwise. It was just too damn boring.

It felt for the most part like a rather faithful adaptation of the book. And I don't think I see any obvious ways that anyone could have made a better film version of this story. But watching the thing unfold, I realized pretty quickly that it makes a far better book than a movie. Actually, it made me call into question a bit just how good a book it might really be, in that I wonder if I were to read it a second time, if I would now find it as boring as the film adaptation.

For starters, the real driving force to the entire tale is the mystery at the heart of it all. And this isn't the sort of mystery where you're rewarded in a second trip by seeing clues strewn along the way that hinted at the solution. It's just "here's the answer," and once you know it, the primary source of tension, suspense, and excitement is completely lost.

The book had a compelling momentum to it when I read it. It was hard to put down. "Just one more chapter," I'd think to myself a lot. The movie lacked that momentum entirely. The action not only didn't seem to rush forward, but seemed to stop at a standstill for long scenes of exposition.

Which goes back to what I now wonder might seem like flaws in the book to me, were I to read it again. There's tons of exposition in the book. More even than in the movie. It didn't seem distracting to me at the time, because it was all necessary background to explain this "interesting theory" -- which really was interesting to me the first time around. But on film, it struck me more like reading (I'm sure to tweak some folks here) Michael Crichton or J.R.R. Tolkien -- "alright folks, I'm going to completely stop the narrative flow for a dozen pages here to lecture you on chaos theory / the eating practices of Hobbits / Constantine's assembly of the Bible."

The secondary source of tension, suspense, and excitement in the book is also absent in the movie -- the deliberate withholding of information. About every other chapter of Dan Brown's book ends with a passage somewhat like this:

"Hand trembling, he opened the door to the closet. What he saw stopped him dead in his tracks." (If books had musical stings, insert one here.)

Some would call this a pretty cheap trick, a crutch of inferior writing. I'll agree it wears pretty thin in the book. But say what you will, it is a trick that works. You keep turning the pages.

But in the movies, you can't get away with this technique very often. Sure, directors will sometimes pull the "angle on the character's reaction to the amazing thing, then cut to an objective view of that thing for the audience." (Spielberg should have patented this.) They can stop a scene at a tense moment to cut to a different scene at a different location. But use these tricks too much on film, and they get old even faster than the literary versions of the same. And Ron Howard is a smart enough director to know this -- thus visiting this well far less often than the novel.

Bottom line: if you're one of the maybe three people in the world who still hasn't read The Da Vinci Code at this point, and were thinking either of doing so or going to see the movie, do as those old TV commercials urged. "Read the book!" Based on my memory of reading the book, I think I'd have rated it a B+ at the time. The movie gets a C. It probably would have gotten less but for the entertaining performance by Ian McKellen. The crowd at my screening was pretty dead until his "first scene" (a voice on an intercom).

We're still very much searching for the "summer blockbuster to see" for 2006.