Tom Hanks getting a haircut made for a much better movie. Note though, that better does not mean good. The Da Vinci Code was so languid and expository that, really, Angels & Demons could not have been worse, but it could have been better. Is it just Dan Brown’s fault? Think about it – this is the director of Frost/Nixon, an infinitely more entertaining and interesting examination of historical documents and the enduring argument between revisionism and history.
Tom Hanks upon discovering the secrets of the plot.
And while Angels & Demons, thankfully, does not feature a man jumping out of a bathroom window of the Louvre onto a truck passing by below or the audacity to ask us we believe that it could happen, but it is the same rough template: Professor of Symbols, Robert Langdon, rushes through the Vatican and Rome (are they serious? “We have four minutes left!” and then in the next scene, they’re driving from the focus point of the shot to another cathedral, and when they get out of the car they say, “One more minute – we have to hurry!”) to trace the ancient illuminati to their Illumination Chapel of Doom.
Robert Langdon and his followers (be they the gruff police commander who May Have A Motive or the Too Ambitious Cardinal Strauss With a Suspicious German Accent) rush from scene to scene, reciting Dan Brown’s Encyclopedia Britannica entries on History. Two things improve the merry-go-round this time: 1) they are running while making the aforementioned recitations and 2) there is a time-line forced into the plot (the preferati will be killed one at a time at 8, 9, 10 and 11, with the entirety of Rome being exploded by an anti-matter bomb at midnight! This gives the viewer of the film the ability to gauge where in the story they are, and know approximately when what will be revealed (for instance: the director’s name, in the credits).
Angels & Demons is the opposite of something I said about a play last week, or maybe it’s not the opposite so much as a bastard cousin. Before seeing “Next Fall” on Broadway, and in response to a suggestion that it might be a little too obvious, a gay couple – one an evangelist and the other an atheist – well, what else can they talk about? I said that there’s nothing more satisfying than a play of ideas. Compare “Angels in America” with “The Philanthropist,” for example. They’re both rompish fantasias, but only one of them has meat on its bones. I would submit that the same thing holds true for movies, and perhaps that’s why I will blindly watch anything The Criterion Collection puts out as essentially my own personal recommendation engine. Does Dan Brown want to reveal something about his subjects, or are they simply window dressing? Maybe Angels & Demons is just window dressing, and that’s probably why it works better than The Da Vinci Code because it lacks the pretension of “blowing the whole thing wide open.” But in choosing to be less (or simply being restrained by the talents of Brown), it only just achieves the measure of its mark.
Something about thrillers that is a pretty routine disappointment – early in the film, Eugene mentioned something that clued me in on a detail I wasn’t really paying attention to, but immediately everything fell into place. And I asked him, “Oh, so you’ve figured it out already?” I hadn’t until he said something, and for awhile it seemed like I was wrong, and this made me enjoy the film more. Until the film decided to prove to me that I wasn’t, and so its surprise was a harbinger of sameness that shouldn’t disappoint and yet, how it falls quietly and in the same manner as all of its brothers like a parachute from the sky in the shadow of an anti-matter explosion (← spoiler).
