So Dark the Con of Hollywood

A few months back, sitting in a West Hollywood screening room, I overheard some animated bits of conversation exchanged between two of those so-called film journalists more affectionately known in our industry as "junket whores," as they pondered to what lengths distributor Sony Pictures might go in promoting its forthcoming film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. "I bet they do it in Paris," said one, suggesting that the primary setting of author Dan Brown's runaway bestseller would make a logical locale for the junket. "The Paris Hotel in Las Vegas is more like it," quipped his companion, noting how, in our economically leaner times, the heretofore spendthrift Hollywood studios have tightened their purse strings when it comes to publicizing their mega-budgeted "tentpole" movies.

Gone, for the most part, are the "good old days" when reporters were invited by Disney to Honolulu to interview the cast and crew Pearl Harbor, or when Fox flew scads of junketeers across the Atlantic to promote the beleaguered Alien: Resurrection. But then again, with its 40-million-copies-and-counting progenitor, an estimated $125 million budget and a plan to release the film worldwide this Friday on nearly 12,000 screens, The Da Vinci Code is hardly your run-of-the-mill event movie. And sure enough, an avalanche of emails from the Sony publicity department soon confirmed that they had something out of the ordinary in store for the film. Though there would be no traditional junket per se, Sony would do nothing short of commandeering a Eurostar train and rechristening it in honor of the movie, while inviting select journalists to join director Ron Howard and the cast on the ten-hour journey from London's Waterloo Station to France, where The Da Vinci Code had been selected for the opening night of the 59^th Cannes Film Festival. What's more, an official from Guinness would join the clambake in order to certify that the train's 1,400-kilometer trip indeed set a new world's record for the longest non-stop international train journey. And there would even be a special press website where interested parties could receive updates on the action as it unfolded.

All of which is to say that Sony has hardly been mum on the subject of all things Da Vinci, save for one small item: when exactly the studio would show the movie to critics. As recently as a month ago, inquiring minds were assured that screenings would be organized in Los Angeles and New York prior to critics' departures for Cannes. But as the May 19 release date drew nigh, Sony's publicists changed their tune and decreed that Da Vinci would in fact not be shown anywhere in the world prior to its first official Cannes press screening on Tuesday evening, May 16, forcing many reviewers from daily and weekly publications to scamper jet-lagged from the airport to the Palais des Festivals, see the movie and then dash bleary-eyed back to their computers to write their reviews on a very short deadline.

The irony, of course, is that as much as studios like to pretend that the opining of critics has little impact on the box office performance of a given film — and as much as box office numbers time and again prove them right — the relationship between studio publicity departments and critics has, in the early days of the Summer 2006 movie season, reached something of an all-time low. Just two weeks ago, Mission: Impossible III was given similar kid-gloves treatment by Paramount. But the secretiveness surrounding The Da Vinci Code transcends even the usual studio jitters about piracy, early reviews and/or the impact of bad buzz on fragile celebrity egos. In L.A. and New York, most journalists weren't invited to see the film before tonight, while one San Francisco colleague I ran into here in Cannes informed me that the Bay Area press screening had been moved from Wednesday to Thursday, in order to prevent reviews from appearing in the Friday papers.

So, why, you ask, is the movie widely tipped to be one of this summer's bonafide box-office blockbusters being guarded with nearly the same intensity that its characters devote to concealing some long-buried details about the sex life of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene? Well, while I've left the L.A. Weekly's resident Da Vinci expert Greg Burk in charge of official reviewing duties, I will say that, as soon as the movie began to play across the screen of Cannes' Debussy theater at last night's jam-packed screening, the secret was out: no matter the rich movie tradition of literary straw being spun into cinematic gold (The Godfather, The Bridges of Madison County, et al.), The Da Vinci Code is spectacularly awful in ways that I suspect even the most cynical appraisers of Brown's novel couldn't quite have anticipated.

I won't bore you with plot details — after all, the movie does more than enough of that itself — except to note that, for all of The Da Vinci Code's scandal-mongering bluster, I can scarcely remember another cat-and-mouse pursuit thriller in which I cared less about who devoured whom. As Tom Hanks' wrongfully-accused Harvard symbology professor and Audrey Tautou's comely Parisian cryptologist get chased high and low by mad monks, dogged detectives and assorted nefarious Catholic Church officials, the cumulative effect is an overwhelming feeling of "So what?", amplified by the film's dire self-seriousness which, at the Tuesday night press screening, sent waves of unintended guffaws rippling through the theater during a climactic revelation scene. Even when one character, in an uncanny channeling of audience sentiments, exclaims "I'm glad this bullshit is over," alas there's still about 45 minutes of screen time left to go.

The Da Vinci Code has been a literary phenomenon that I will not even try to account for, especially since I could do no better than H.L. Mencken and his enduring words about the taste of the American public. So, a film version was inevitable, and indeed this one does keep you pinned to the edge of your seat — not guessing whodunit, mind you, but trying to solve the considerably greater mystery of why talent the caliber of Hanks and director Ron Howard (coming off of two of his best, if least commercially successful pictures, The Missing and Cinderella Man) were inspired to pimp themselves out for such a sub-pedestrian potboiler (which never begins to simmer, let alone boil). What did these two industry giants — each of whom can more or less make any movie he wants — think they could achieve, especially given a script (by Akiva Goldsman) so repetitive and didactic that it begins to recall one of those special television programs that are narrated for the blind?

Or did the makers of The Da Vinci Code think at all, or were they blinded by the dollar signs that so clearly danced in their eyes? It's a question that cuts straight to the heart of Cannes itself, and it may well be that The Da Vinci Code is actually an ideal curtain-raiser for a festival that has long been torn between challenging "auteur" cinema and more commercial, star-driven (read: Hollywood) fare — longer, in fact, than most people think. As an excellent article appearing in the current issue of weekly Variety, co-authored by industry reporter Ian Mohr and longtime Variety critic Derek Elley, points out, Cannes and Hollywood have gone hand-in-glove since the very beginnings of the festival in the 1950s, with the likes of The Birds, Mary Poppins and Ben-Hur popping up here throughout the 1960s (even as Easy Rider and other films of the "New Hollywood" cinema began to make their presence known). Which is to say nothing of the real engine that drives Cannes: the Marché du Film, or Cannes Market, which takes up the entirety of the cavernous basement (and then some) of the Palais des Festivals and which is where thousands of movies ranging from those screening in Cannes' official sections to the latest Roger Corman-produced monster mash are sold by the pound to international distributors and television broadcasters.

In other words: for all the hand-wringing over the "identity" and "direction" of Cannes — including this week's myopic New York Times editorial suggesting that the festival's top competitive prize, the Palme d'Or, is a kiss of death at the box-office, no matter the slew of solid performers (including Fahrenheit 9/11, The Pianist and Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies) that have garnered the prize in the last decade alone — the more things seem to change, the more they really stay the same. Hence, later this week, X-Men: The Last Stand will make its world premiere here sandwiched between the latest comedy from master Italian satirist Nanni Moretti and the new film by deadpan Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki. And the day after that, Amores Perros and 21 Grams director Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (starring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt among others) will be followed by the war movie Flanders, whose director, Bruno Dumont, caused a mini-scandal in Cannes when his earlier L'Humanité won prizes for its nonprofessional leading actors. The goal of Cannes, as I see it, is simply to showcase the art of cinema in all its various incarnations. To which I can only say that The Da Vinci Code is no Mona Lisa.

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