Angels & Demons
Directed by Ron Howard. Written by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman; based on the novel by Dan Brown. With Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgard, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Pierfrancesco Favino. (PG-13)
Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons is a bit late getting to the screen. The precursor to his enormously successful The Da Vinci Code, it was published in 2000 but had to wait its turn, like so many children do, as its more popular sibling hogged the limelight. The irony is that Angels & Demons is really the better book—without the pseudo-historical balderdash of its successor, it was a lean page-turner that relied more on the foundations of the genre—secret societies, Grand Guignol deaths—than pretentious art history fabrications.
To be fair to other books, neither of the two was really that special, but as the basis for a summertime popcorn movie, both had huge promise, one half of which was wasted when the film version of The Da Vinci Code came out. A muddled mess of a movie that managed to offend both devout Catholics and cinephiles (groups more usually on opposite sides of the ramparts), its most remarked-on feature was the haircut of lead actor Tom Hanks, whose "symbologist" and Harvard professor Robert Langdon sported a sort of Ivy League mullet.
Hanks returns here as Langdon, whom we first see swimming in the Harvard pool as a Vatican emissary comes calling. The Pope is dead—possibly murdered—and just as the College of Cardinals is entering into seclusion to choose his successor, the Vatican gets a message intimating that an ancient society of intellectuals—The Illuminati—have kidnapped the four cardinals favored to be elected Pope and are planning to dismantle the Church through a campaign of terror and murder.
Sounds good, right? And it is, until the script forces Hanks to explain hundreds of years of art history and church doctrine while he's running after villains. From there, the film plays out the same story four times in a row: Langdon deciphers clues that lead him to the next place of execution, and races across Rome in hopes of saving one of the cardinals. It's not giving away anything for a film like this to say that he often doesn't make it in time.
It's all absurd, even before I mention that the entire plot revolves around an anti-matter bomb stolen from the CERN laboratory in Geneva and hidden somewhere in the Vatican. The filmmakers, who include Oscar-winners Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman, seem to want to have it both ways: an action thriller that's as erudite as an Umberto Eco novel. They end up with neither; just when the action starts to gel, Hanks pipes up with a lecture explaining what we're seeing onscreen, and as soon as we're interested in what he has to say, he's racing off to play the hero. It's all pretty tiring, and worse, boring. Passing a bookstore recently, I couldn't help but notice that Dan Brown has a new book coming out; I can only hope that the eventual movie doesn't take itself so seriously.
*
Also this week: As long as the Terminators of the world resist impersonating French philosopher-poets, Amherst Cinema seems content to buck the blockbuster trend. Perhaps as action films get darker and indie films get lighter, they'll meet in some future gray zone where an aging Schwarzenegger, in ascot and armchair, stroking a beloved but failing Schnauzer, ruminates on his inglorious past. But for now, thankfully, they remain committed to offering something more than an air-conditioned afternoon respite.
Their offerings this week include two films that focus on small stories to tell a larger tale, one a documentary whose story of a Los Angeles land grab recalls the machinations of Polanski's Chinatown; the other a French romance that recalls the film imports whose foreign yet familiar magic gave art cinema its first real foothold in the States.
The Garden is both title and subject of Scott Hamilton Kennedy's trim 80-minute documentary focusing on a community gardening plot in South Central Los Angeles. The largest garden of its type in the country, the 14-acre expanse (for non-farmers, a single acre is slightly smaller than an entire football field) was created as a way to help heal the city in the aftermath of the 1992 riots in L.A. By all accounts, it was a wild success, with local gardeners growing their own food, contributing to the community, and creating an oasis in an often-troubled zone of the city.
Why, then, asks Kennedy, are the bulldozers waiting at the gate? In a city famous for its back-door maneuvering, the L.A. City Council lives up to its reputation when it lowers the boom on the garden. As he delves deeper into the politics behind the decision to level the garden, Kennedy asks a lot of questions: Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than its fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the city council? Why have the details never been made public?
For every question, the city elders both throw up their hands and claim that they're tied. But the gardeners, many of whom hail from Latin American countries where opposition to the state is met with violence, have learned well the lessons of America: they're organized, angry, and ready to fight City Hall.
In Shall We Kiss?, the drolly playful new romance from writer, director and star Emmanuel Mouret, we have a film from a man perhaps best described as the Woody Allen of France. Like Allen (or at least the younger Allen), he has a tender but fumbling way with emotions that endears his viewers to him—we want to make him matzoh ball soup, but with Herbes de Provence.
Here he plays Nicolas, a math teacher who gets unexpectedly involved with close friend Judith after a supposedly innocent kiss takes on a life of its own. But their relationship is the story within the story, told by Emilie (Julie Gayet, of Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend), a young designer who has quickly fallen for Gabriel, a man she has met by chance on the road to Nantes. Though they are undeniably attracted to each other, she explains that even the single goodnight kiss he requests could lead to all sorts of complications, then tells him the story of Nicolas and Judith.
There's something essentially French about Shall We Kiss?, some soupcon of old chivalry mixed with a continental joie de vivre, that highlights differences with our homegrown romantic comedies which so often resort to the bookend cliches of ageism: too often on these shores we're stuck in either the realms of over-sexed teenagers or the under-sexed elderly. For the stories about everything in between, the best place to look is still overseas.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
