And now the circus goes quiet. In the hush, under the spotlight, after 40 days and 40 nights of manufactured hype and impassioned controversy (or is it the other way around?), stands a small, surprisingly ordinary movie. As a film derived from a book, ''The Da Vinci Code" isn't a fiasco on the order of ''The Bonfire of the Vanities" nor is it a triumph a la ''The Lord of the Rings." Instead, it's an acceptable but uninspired simulacrum: an overly faithful multiplex translation of a very, very popular airport novel.
Painted into a corner
By sticking faithfully to the novel, 'The Da Vinci Code' never comes to life
The Hollywood alchemists haven't turned gold to lead. They've turned copper to zinc.
Ron Howard, it turns out, was precisely the wrong person to bring Dan Brown's best-selling novel to the screen. This project needed a risk-taker and a stylist, someone who could transmute a book that alternates routine action scenes with art-history lectures into riveting cinema. Howard's a good studio soldier, though, and with his house screenwriter Akiva Goldsman he has delivered a ''Da Vinci Code" that's chained timidly to its source. If you've read the book, it'll seem like a dutiful pilgrim's tour of the salient plot points: Here we are at the Louvre, now we go to the Bank of Zurich, whoops, Jesus had a home life. If you haven't read the book, you may wonder what all the noise was about.
How's Tom Hanks's hair? Fine, fine; it's a wardrobe affectation but you get over it after the first few scenes. The real problem facing our Tom is that he doesn't have a character to play. Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and dashing doubting Thomas, functions as a mouthpiece for Brown's wild and woolly Christian conspiracy theories, and where it's easy for a reader to project three-dimensionality onto the character on the page, Hanks is left holding the bag onscreen.
As the audience's surrogate American in Paris, Langdon has to declaim silly lines of exposition such as ''This is the Bois de Boulogne?" or expound at length on the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci and the shadowy Priory of Sion to Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), the fetching French cryptographer who gets swept up in the mystery. Hanks never breaks through the thick webbing of plot to create a viable human being, though; this may be his most constipated, least Hanksian performance ever.
Nor does Tautou, the wonky free spirit of ''Amelie," fare any better. Sophie is stuck asking breathless questions so Langdon can give his discourses; she also occasionally cranks up the suspense by urgently whispering, ''We must find anozzer way!" Don't expect romance between these two, either. Langdon's admiring ''I've never met a girl who knew that much about a cryptex" is the closest he gets to sweet nothings.
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