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Written by Knight Ridder
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Wednesday, 17 May 2006 |
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Usually, when a movie with so much potential is opening the next weekend, you find prominent stories in Sunday newspapers. Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard are usually happy to do a few select interviews to support their films.
Yet the only promotion being done for the film version of Dan Brown’s novel, which has a powerful Catholic Church sect conspiring to keep a mind-blowing secret, is the film’s trailer and TV commercials.
Everything else is bolted down tight.
This is not about keeping the secret. Even those who haven’t read the novel have probably heard — via the media, which has examined the potboiler as if it were, well, the Holy Grail — the answer to the mystery it poses.
Though the Catholic Church has condemned the movie for its distortions, it has also condemned harmless heresies like Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” and, weirdly, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which turned out to be a deeply spiritual movie.
And remember, until the 1960s, the Church condemned movies on a weekly basis, providing families with a list of movies it deemed as unacceptable as meat on Friday.
In most cases, the makers of religious movies that are controversial seize on publicity, hoping the controversy will translate to attention.
“The Da Vinci Code” is something different, and so the decision was made: Everybody shut up.
The strategy is apparently twofold.
Journalists tend to especially admire Hanks and Howard, because they are honest, intelligent and seemingly genuine. (The secret to acting, said George Burns, is sincerity: “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”)
Because of that, the two men might be expected to accidentally say something that would fuel the controversy or that could be interpreted as a gotcha.
Second, of the 40 million people who have read “The Da Vinci Code,” the great majority, according to booksellers, are older than 30. Many of them are as fascinated by the snippets of history and theological scholarship in the book as they are by its cracked conspiracy theories, which are about as credible as LBJ’s involvement in JFK’s murder or the Jewish banking cabal.
“The Da Vinci Code” has created a run on cracked theories and real scholarship, as any trip to a bookstore will quickly reveal.
Target moviegoers, however, are not hip to the Gnostic gospels.
Maybe they will be someday, when they start looking for the spiritual symbolism behind the X-Men. Generally, they don’t go to movies about religion, which is why the “The Passion of the Christ” was a phenomenon, not a trend.
The studio releasing “The Da Vinci Code” hopes that twentysomething filmgoers have only a vague notion of what the film might be about, and that they will simply go to see Tom Hanks in a thriller.
It makes next weekend’s godless box office race all the more interesting because it isn’t Tom Cruise’s continuing popularity that’s being tested.
It’s the marketing of a movie that has enormous brand name appeal, built-in demographic difficulties and — oh, did we mention — if it’s true to Brown’s breathless and often ridiculous novel, it dares to question the foundation of faith of millions of Christians.
Heathen Hollywood may be saying a few prayers too. | Only registered users can write comments.
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