The Great Ganesha

So, I finally saw The Da Vinci Code yesterday. My other choice (based on movie times) was X3, and, like a regular sucker, I caved in to the controversy. The average audience member was white, in their upper forties. In fact, where I was sitting, I was surrounded on three sides by white, middle-aged women in groups of two. Quite reminiscent of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character on SNL.

Before I begin though, I have to say this: There was a desi guy sitting next to me with his wife and he was almost as entertaining as the movie. There was constant commentary coming from his corner – “ab maregi, sali” and “he’s jesus!” and so on. Not to mention two loud cell phone rings followed by “Dipen? Arrey picture mein hoon, yaar! Baad mein baat karenge. Aur kuchh?” And he did this twice. I mean, he did possibly everything short of burping after taking the last few, really loud sips of his coke and then proceeding to scratch his golgappas. Needless to say, the Church Ladies were not amused…

Anyhow, despite that, I found the movie to be quite enjoyable. In fact, I should actually say that it was one of the few movies that I enjoyed more than the book. It was painful for me to read through all those excruciating historical details about Christianity in the book. If I wanted to read about Christian history, I would have bought a book on Christian history. The movie however, crystallized the important points, gave nice visual aids and summarized the stuff into nice talking points, keeping it under 30 seconds for each “history lesson”. I also particularly liked the way technology was used to create the flashback and historical sequences – very slick and detailed. I should add the disclaimer that I am totally clueless about the film’s factual accuracy (why should I let something as inconsequential as the truth get in the way of a good time?).

Another plus for the movie was that it was not “Hollywoodized” like A Beautiful Mind (another Howard film) where Nash ends up talking about love at his Nobel speech. In fact, I was actually dreading the borderline paedophilic romantic interlude between Hanks’ character and Tatou’s character. Fortunately, it never came. There was more than the usual amount of blood and gore, but it added to the drama. And there was one brief car chase, but other than that, no expensive explosions and no elaborate chases.

As far as the acting is concerned, I’m neither a fan of Hanks nor Tatou, but their roles were not exactly challenging, so they passed (B-). I’m a big fan of both Alfred Molina and Jean Reno and although Molina has played the heavy before (in Chocolat, for example), Reno was in an somewhat uncharacteristic role. He is often seen as the world-weary and honest character with a heart of gold (either an assassin who helps kids or a cop who forgives loveable criminals) He was a cop in this one as well, but his character was religious, verging on fanatical. He probably could have played the role better in the hands of another director, but the fact that he was cast in this sort of role was interesting nonetheless.

The bottomline? I was expecting some mind-numbing entertainment from the book and the movie. The movie delivered it better than the book. There were no sappy romantic scenes, no adrenaline-charged action sequences and the acting was passable. IMDb rating was 6.5, last time I checked. I give it 6/10 and am indifferent to watching it on either DVD or the big screen. For the full effect of the historical sequences though, you should watch it on-screen.

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