2006年NPR美国国家公共电台五月-Review: 'The Da Vinci Code'

Anchor: Dan Brown's best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code" is second only to the "Harry 1 Potter" series as the best-selling novel of all time. And it has inspired a whole slew 2 of books on Biblical puzzles, Opus Dei, and the life of Mary Magdalene, as well as some debunking 3 Brown's premise 4. Now comes Director Ron Howard's long anticipated film, starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou. Film critic David Edelstein has a review.

David Edelstein: Columbia Pictures wouldn't let anyone see "The Da Vinci Code" until a couple of days ago, so there was nothing much for the media to report on expect the protests of Catholics and other Christian 5 groups, but it turns out the real story is that the mega-budget movie is an embarrassing nonevent. Any Catholic leader who actually sits through it will probably tell the picketers to go home. I should mention that those leaders aren't paranoid. Dan Brown's best-selling novel really is an assault on the foundations of their faith. Brown isn't the only person to speculate on the political intentions behind the writing of the Gospels, but he ratchets up the stakes by spinning a counter-theory revolving 6 around Mary Magdalene, and by making the Catholic Opus Dei sect 7 a bastion of homicidal zealots determined 8 to suppress the truth. Throwing car chases, a mutilated corpse 9 in the Louvre, skulking 10 bishops 11, a mysterious criminal mastermind, a self-flagellating killer 12 albino and cryptogrammatic clues hidden in masterpieces of western art, and you've got yourself a publishing phenomenon that even a lot of church-goers couldn't resist.

David Edelstein: The director Ron Howard, and the screen writer Akiva Goldsman have made little of all this. The movie is divinely uninspired. It's a shaggy Grail story without a whisper of passion, not even the passion for intellectual gamesmanship that buttressed 13 all the sentimental 14 glop in their best-known collaboration 15, "A Beautiful Mind". What keeps you turning pages in the novel is the mixture of Hitchcock and Will Shortz. A man wrongfully accused of murder, hurtling from place to place, while madly solving the puzzles left by the dead guy. But Howard and Goldsman have come up with a deadly blend, a movie both really slow and impossible to follow, I feel a little sorry for Tom Hanks, who plays the wrongfully accused puzzle solver, the famed Harvard symbologist, Robert Langdon. The Da Vinci Code was obviously a money job for him, and the money was obviously great, but it has to be rough on a smart actor when there was nothing to play, no subtext, no strong objective, and no one much to play against.

David Edelstein: His co-star is Audrey Tautou, miscast as a French cryptologist and the granddaughter of the dead Louvre curator. As an actress, she seems bred for airy enchantment 16, not earthy gumption 17. And her very approximate English diction turns even rudimentary dialogue into a linguistic 18 adventure. Here, she and Hanks contemplate 19 something pulled from a safe deposit box called a cryptex.

~~~ Film Clip ~~~

Sophie Neveu: Cryptex, they are used to keep secrets. It's Da Vinci's design, you write the information on a papyrus 20 scroll 21 which is then rolled around a thin glass vial of vinegar. If you force it open, the vial breaks, vinegar dissolves papyrus and your secret is lost forever. The only way to access the information's to spell out the password with these 5 dials, each with 26 letters, that's 12 million possibilities.

Robert Langdon: I've never met a girl who knew that much about cryptex.

Sophie Neveu: Sauniere made one for me once.

Robert Langdon: My grandfather gave me a wagon 22.

~~~ Film Clip ~~~

David Edelstein: While she describes the cryptex, we see the interior workings of it. It's like an insert in CSI, and I normally find scenes like that hard to resist. But Ron Howard can't manage to generate any momentum 23 or suspense 24, and Goldsman does such a poor job of storytelling that the subversive 25 goddess worship doesn't have any impact either. The only diversions in the movie are Sir Ian McKellen's scenery chewing, and the miscast but game Paul Bettany doing his best to embody 26 religious dementia as the Opus Dei albino.

David Edelstein: If there's anything to be learnt from this dud, it's that when you adapt an explosive property like "The Da Vinci Code", playing it safe isn't safe, either swallow hard and make the damnable thing or give it to someone with more guts 27 andor less to lose. Here is a saga 28 that strikes at the heart of western religion, and it plays like there is absolutely nothing at stake.

Anchor: David Edelstein is film...

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Words in NPR
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be second only to: used to emphasize that something is nearly the largest, most important etc; 次于...
nonevent: an event that is disappointing because it is much less interesting, exciting, or important than you expected; 大肆宣扬即将来临而结果未发生之事
papyrus scroll: 古本手卷