HelenE-3 Reviews

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

The Maguffin ate the movie

[2/10 · 21 May 2006]

I saw this movie because I thought I ought to find out about The Da Vinci Code before responding to the apparent nonsense people say is in it, and I couldn't read the book. I tried, the Spirit of the Eternal Feminine Wisdom knows, I tried, but I couldn't get past the first four words "Renowned curator Jaques Sauniere...". That's a real hook. I flicked over a few pages and tried to find some juicy bits, but kept sticking on redundant or ill-formed sentences and the odd bit of contentious assertion. Actually, it took an effort to open the book in the first place because the title is so annoying -- he's Leonardo, dammit, Leonardo. From a place in Tuscany called Vinci. It's like calling Rembrandt "van Rijn".

But many inept books make pretty good movies, especially rip-roaring genre tales: the Bourne series, with action chases in tourist destinations around the world is an obvious example of how to do it, and Hitchcock is the great granddaddy of the art (though he often abandoned most of a book he adapted -- what are The 39 Steps?). Ron Howard has a track record of workmanlike, slightly uplifting entertainment, at least, and should be up to the challenge of a page-turning novel.

Unfortunately, it is the ideas in the Da Vinci Code novel that are the source of its popularity. Judging from the movie, there is no plot as such, only a series of puzzles that Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu need to solve to move on to another picturesque location. The police and an assassin-monk, who talks Latin on his phone to a mysterious Teacher, are always hot on their tracks, but never interrupt the solution of the puzzle, there are some senior Catholic churchmen conspiring, but the main one is called Aringarosa, so you know you can ignore them, and an aged "Grail scholar" called Leigh Teabing (sic) adds camp comic relief and complicates the plot in ways I couldn't fathom on one viewing. Instead of action scenes, with Tom Hanks as Langdon emulating Cary Grant as the innocent caught up in a caper in North By North West, as you might initially expect, things stop, even when the police are almost there, for Langdon, Neveu or Teabing to explain stuff about the history of art, the Templars or some guff called the Priory of Sion, all of it neither familiar to most people nor plausible to anyone who knows anything about any of it. (The great joke about the "code" in Leonardo's Last Supper fresco is that the feminine appearance of St John is really an allusion to the idea, promulgated by naughty queer artists like Leonardo because the evangelist refers to John as "the disciple Jesus loved", that he was Jesus' boyfriend, a fact well known to art historians but scrupulously suppressed by pious critics of The Da Vinci Code. The last sentence has about as much to do with the film as a lot of the verbiage in the film has to do even with the alleged plot, just to give you an idea of what the film is like. Except that my sentence is more or less true.) There are, to be fair, chases, gun fights, and some reasonably nifty musical excitement, but it keeps stopping for all that talk. Only Ian McKellen, camp as Christmas as Teabing, manages to make the words entertaining. Tom Hanks as Langdon is plain wooden, and Audrey Tatou as Sophie -- there's a clue in the name for anyone who has read the Comic Classics Gnostics -- isn't made nearly as gorgeous as she needs to be, and as she was in Amelie. Their lack of allure certainly isn't the actors' fault (though Hanks might have drawn the line at his haircut), and quite likely not Howard's -- the decision to keep the "substance" of the novel in the movie was presumably the studio's as much as his, and was probably unavoidable given the hoo-hah about it.

And Howard and his team are at least competent filmmakers in a way that Dan Brown and his editors (if he has any) are not literary novelists. I did make it through the movie without too much pain and with only the odd inner groan. But the most powerful and moving part of the evening by far was the trailer for United 93.

King Kong (2005)

A fairytale of New York

[10/10 · 21 March 2006]

Merian Cooper's 1933 King Kong is a monster of a movie about making a movie. Carl Denham wants to film a giant ape on an unknown island, but audiences want to look at girls, so he takes Ann Darrow along. For Denham, Kong is the wonder of the movies and Ann is there to lure audiences; but she is also the beauty that subdues the beast, not just Kong, a monster from the id, but Jack Driscoll, a tough sailor with a bit of an ego who protects her from Kong so that they can lived happy ever after. Driscoll represents the ordinary guy in the audience as he might like to see himself; Kong is the scariness of an idea that gets loose and arouses the masses. For RKO, scariness, horror, was profitable: King Kong was a blockbuster and saved the studio. Its stunning effects and imaginative scope hit a more visceral spot than Universal's arty, European monster movie, Frankenstein. Kong lined up with Moby-Dick as an icon for distinctively American grandeur and ambition.

Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong is also a monster. It is more than three hours long and overloaded with visual effects, emotional punches and resonant allusions. Jackson seems to want to reproduce the imaginative pleasure of the original for an audience that doesn't necessarily know it. But Hollywood now belongs to the world, and there is no problem with Jackson making the bulk of the film in his native New Zealand. Indeed, the film has a deep-rooted joke about a deranged director taking American-based actors to a godforsaken island in the south Pacific to make a movie of grandiose ambition. Jack Black's Carl Denham is styled as Orson Welles, but shares Jackson's porkiness and, as he is making the same monstrous movie, his obsession.

This film knows it's a remake of Cooper's -- Fay Wray's unavailability is mentioned, two actors perform a brief scene lifted verbatim, snippets of the original music well up-- but something more complex is going on. The depression-era New York of the 1933 movie was reality into which Kong intruded. Jackson's 1933 New York is as much a place of the imagination as Skull Island, Kong's terrifying home: after an opening montage of zoo animals and starving people, the skyline rises pearly and organic, more Neuschwannstein than modernity. Colours are warm and muted, comforting even when the subject matter is chilly, and, yes, reminiscent of Disney's first animated features. This is 1933 as seen from today. The characters too are warmer: Ann is an earth mother, talented in Vaudeville and with aspirations to cutting-edge straight theatre -- Naomi Watts is luminous as Ann, something like a blue-collar Emma Thompson; Jack is her ideal playwright, as glamorous as Eugene O'Neill, who did the tramp steamer thing in his youth, and almost as unlucky in the movies as Barton Fink. Kong too is a different beast, a realistic gorilla who happens to be twenty-five feet tall. We now love gorillas for being a bit like us, part toddler, part old lady. He's still frightening, but mainly because he doesn't know his own strength, and is a touch possessive about Ann.

And the sexual politics of the plot is upturned: taking off from Denham's "Arab proverb", Jackson's team provide another spin on Beauty and the Beast, with some help from Disney's quasi-feminist reading and some of the poetry of Cocteau's. After a prelude where she is let down by a fatherly but battered older guy, Ann "ought" to be in love with Jack, but somehow their wordless gazes and verbal fumblings aren't enough to convince her that he won't, like everyone else, let her down, even after he's rescued her from Kong, assisted by a passing pterodactyl. But she forms a bond with the beastly Kong, whose language skills are negligible but who thwacks dinosaurs for her and takes her for a romantic skate in Central Park. Another battered, and obviously lonely, older guy, he doesn't let her down. When they gaze into each others' eyes, we are clearly meant to see mutual nurturing, even if Kong wreaks mayhem the rest of the time. When Kong dies, falling off the Empire State Building, Jack is magically there and she is finally ready to gaze into his eyes for real.

Within the linked arcs of the original plot and the fairytale, there is some thematic colour. For example, the First Mate, Hayes, nurtures Jimmy, a previously feral boy who steals a copy of Heart of Darkness and a pen, and who will probably end up a writer. There is also a lot of fun, above all a wonderfully naff dinosaur pileup, some stomach-churning creepy-crawlies, and Kong's action sequences. The new material is done roughly in 1930s style, without much backstory and closure, but the script and performances are good enough to carry it off. The various characters on the ship that sails to Skull Island are like those of a war film, and Ann and Jack's romance begins like a screwball comedy, although Jack is more like the cultivated chaps who come through as adventure heroes, played by Robert Donat or Ronald Colman in the later 1930s; Adrien Brody, in spite of an expressionist-looking track record in films, has the style and substance as Jack to make you wish Ann-and-Jack was a complete story, not just a context for Kong.

So it is all rather overdone, but that's the point. You may want to scream at times, but the only sensible thing to do is to let Kong sweep you off your feet, and weep for him.

Sodom and Gomorrah (1922)

The wages of sin is tedium

[19 August 2003]

I saw this at the London Film Festival in 1995 or 1996. The print had been lovingly restored from sections scattered around the world, including some from archives in Moscow. Somebody near me said "I'm really looking forward to this", which was understandable, since the director, as Michael Curtiz, later made some jolly swashbucklers and Casablanca, and the LFF had previously come up with several almost unknown silent masterpieces, including Jacques Feyder's Visage d'enfants.

Well, the pianist was superb and the voice-over translator (no time to translate the German titles) produced some splendid characterization. But about ten minutes in, people realised that the film was incredibly bad, and they didn't even know when it would be over as it hadn't been projected complete before. Watching it felt like existentialist hell. Which was fair enough as it's meant to be a study of sin and remorse. A young man is tempted by sex, drugs and stuff, but he falls asleep and dreams of the biblical story of the destruction of the cities of the plain, which are a bit like Vienna and populated by his low-life pals. When he wakes up, he repents. I think the sin stuff is meant to be alluring and you're meant to think that the director has been clever framing it in a moral tale. Instead, you get the idea that sin is a lot less interesting than, maybe, a novel by Jane Austen.

It's really a very substandard knockoff of Intolerance, possibly of interest to design specialists.

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)

You don't have to be Indian

[23 August 2001]

I've just seen Lagaan in a fairly small house with an audience that seemed to be about half Indian (broadly speaking) and half not. Everybody loved it, including me. It didn't seem four hours long, but then a game of cricket lasts a lot longer and it was targetted at cricket fans.

I've only seen one other Bollywood film ever, Jai Santoshi Ma, and that was on television years ago. But I've read that they've become increasingly less "Indian", and these days tend to focus on beautiful young people in an international setting. Lagaan is quite the opposite, definitely set in rural India, and it seems to follow the other conventions, for example, everyone bursting into song and dance at key points, and a strong (but often humorous) background presence of Hindu deities. It differs from other, older, Bollywood films in that its theme is explicitly about spiritual resistance to the British Empire.

Its main appeal to me is that it brings out the emotional appeal of a lot of different film genres in a coherent way. The central theme is the High Noon style personal duel between Bhuvan, the dashing hero, and Russell, the stupid and nasty British soldier in charge of the garrison. But the clash of cultures and good/evil around it is also pure Star Wars, and the way the different team members come together has a touch of Robin Hood (with Russell's honorable sister Elizabeth as Marian) or the Magnificent Seven, as well as of Jesus and the Apostles. The characters are appealing in themselves and plausible as a team. And the song-and-dance production numbers have an appeal of their own, especially the very funny one where Elizabeth sings in English in her boudoir while Bhuvan and his beloved Gauri do a more convention duet in the country side.

What integrates all this is the cricket match, which provides a set of situations and rules for a conflict. There are a lot of cricket jokes (some anachronistic or knowing) but it's really more like an Ealing comedy where the spirit of the little guys makes them bigger than the powerful guys.