And There Came a Collaboration

I am a fan of directors and actors who work together on multiple projects. Scorsese and DeNiro. Depp and Burton. Washington and Lee.

Empire Online has a great story about these kinds of pairings which you can read HERE.

Now Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, who first worked together in Splash and have collaborated three other times: The Davinci Code, Apollo 13 and Angels and Demons. Now comes word that they will work together again on an adaptation of the hit novel Inferno by Dan Brown featuring the Robert Langdon character Hanks and Howard made famous.

You can read all about it HERE from the London Daily Telegraph.

Inferno – A Book Review

Right up front, I will admit that I like Robert Langdon, the protagonist of Angels and Demons, The DaVinci Code, The Lost Symbol and Dan Brown’s latest book Inferno. I like reading about or watching smart people thinking smart thoughts and doing smart things. Langdon fits that bill. He’s not Indiana Jones, but he’s not meant to be. He’s a nerd, not particularly physically impressive, and always in trouble way over his pay grade.

He’s fun to read about.

And watch. Let’s remember, Tom Hanks has played him in two films and, I must admit, that whatever enjoyment I got from reading Inferno had a lot to do with picturing Tom Hanks as Langdon. It bought the book a lot of leeway with me.

The book needed it.

Brown begins the action in medias res, and that’s fine. That’s a good technique. Put the reader right in the middle of the action and let the characters explain their way out of it. This device tends to rely on the fact that the characters know what’s going on. Brown makes the odd choice – and this is not a spoiler – to have Langdon suffering from short-term amnesia. This choice puts Langdon behind the 8-Ball, which is good and builds tension, but the choice also leads to a pretty murky plot for the majority of the book. Until Langdon recovered his memory, it was hard for me to give myself over entirely to the novel.

By the end, however, I was immersed enough in the proceedings that I couldn’t put the book down until I completed the last chapters in the wee hours of the morning, closing the covers well after 3:00 am one night. That’s a sign to me of a thriller that got to me the way it should.

The novel revolves around a mystery tied into Dante’s Inferno, the famous poem from which western culture gleans many of its images about Hell. I am NO expert in the poem, though I’ve read parts of it, and I am sure that The Magister and The Junior Senator would be able to point out just how wrong Brown got it in his research and how silly some of his allusions were, but such distinctions are lost on me. Frankly, I mainly read through them to get to the next plot point, the next maze, the next painting Langdon has to decipher or line of poetry he has to parse. There are good moments like this in the book.

The plot itself ranges from confusing to ridiculous to unwieldy before – somehow – coalescing into a satisfying resolution. Brown introduces an entirely new set of characters with whom Langdon interacts (or new to me – though I’ve read the previous Langdon books, I cannot say I’ve committed them to memory – in Brown’s novels, all the characters outside Langdon are too thinly drawn to do so at-any-rate). It’s clear that, like the rest of us, Brown has read Steig Larrson’s Millennium Trilogy. He introduces a very Lisbeth Salander-like character with whom Langdon needs to contend as well as giving him – for the third time (he skipped this trope in The Lost Symbol) – a young woman who becomes his ally on the run. Sienna Brooks serves the role as Langdon’s erstwhile partner and, outside of the protagonist himself, she is the most memorable character in the novel.

Brown is smart enough to try to play on audience expectations and reverse many of them – the idea of Langdon having amnesia was surely a function of that impulse. And, while he is marginally successful in these attempts, he does save a pretty solid – if not entirely original – twist for the last act of the book. It was worth getting to and was the twist that kept me up late.

One of the weaknesses I struggled with during the novel was getting a grasp on just who the antagonist or antagonists of the piece were. Was it the crazy billionaire? The shadowy organization called The Consortium that Brown, in the forward to the novel, claims is real? The World Health Organization? The Silver Haired Woman? Obviously, the reader is intentionally left in the dark about some of this owning to Langdon’s amnesia, but too much so for my taste.

Brown has a message here and, while Inferno is not quite a polemic, it does meander in that direction. I was surprised – in a good way – by the conclusion of the novel and Brown’s commentary on what his character identify as a central issue facing the world. His treatment of the issue through the conclusion of the plot may not be realistic, but it feels final.

Inferno is entertaining, if not gripping, smart, though not as gee-whiz impressive as earlier efforts, satisfying, but not completely.

Angels and Demons and Francis I.

Though we settled on Seinfeld when deciding what we might watch last night following a day of being out of the house, The Cinnamon Girl and HJ, jr and I considered a film that, I suspect, was popped into all kinds of DVD players or streamed to thousands of televisions over the last few days: Angels and Demons. A quick check on the Internet Movie Database –  IMDB – shows that interest in the movie on the popular website increased almost 200% last week.  That’s what the selection of a new pope will do for your movie, Ron Howard.

We have two copies of the novel and I don’t know why… we must have liked it!

I am a fan of the Dan Brown Robert Langdon books.  Actually, to be clear, I am a fan of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.  The Lost Symbol seemed to me to be going back to the well once too often and seemed to cripple Brown as a writer. He’s not published anything since as far as I know. As a Catholic, I guess I am supposed to be upset and offended by some of the more heretical suggestions in the Langdon trilogy, specifically in Da Vinci and Demons, but , unless I missed something, I think these books are categorized as fiction, so I never have understood what the furor was all about.  I do remember that  the Catholic high school where I work was contacted by the local media when The Da Vinci Code film came out for comment on the controversy. I thought that was kind of funny.

I like Dan Brown’s story – by that I mean I like the story that Dan Brown tells about himself and getting Angels and Demons published.  Because The Da Vinci Code was so massively popular, it is often forgotten that it was actually the sequel to Angels and Demons. To hear Brown tell it, no one wanted to publish either Angels and Demons or The Da Vinci Code and, after a very small print run for the former, Brown and his wife self published the latter and sold copies of it out of the hatch of their station wagon. Or, at least, that’s how I remember hearing the story.

As a frustrated novelist with rejection letters to fuel my consternation, I find this story highly romantic.

I have no doubt that Brown’s novel was pulled of many a bookshelf in the last week and the movie was, likewise, screened time-and-again in homes world-wide.

I remind myself again that it’s fiction, but it’s fiction that, with the election of Pope Francis I, seems relevant.

Pope Francis has been termed the first Jesuit pope and, though that is technically not true – all ordered priests who become bishops are required to renounce their affiliation to their respective orders when they are elevated – it is very true that Francis’ formation and the majority of his ministry was conducted when he was a member of the Society of Jesus. Graduating from and teaching in a Jesuit high school has left me fairly familiar with the Jesuits and I can say that I am ever impressed by their mantra of being in the world but not of the world. It’s a tricky business that has gotten them in trouble with the Vatican over the years… being IN the world means to me that Jesuits tend to be very connected to the real challenges of people around them, especially the poor, and try to find ways to help them.  Not being OF the world means Jesuits reject the values of the world and substitute the values of Christ.

As I say, it’s a tricky business.

I am no papal scholar – I leave that kind of stuff to The Magister – but I do know that, so far, I like what I’ve seen from Pope Francis. I like that his first homily wasn’t in Latin. I like that he asked his fellow Argentinians to forgo trips to Rome and, rather, to give their money to the poor. I like that, after his election as pope, he walked from the Vatican to his hotel to pay his bill.

Good stuff.

I hope he found time to watch some movies before his election. He may not have time, now.  Maybe he’s seen Saving Grace (one of my favorite movies of all time) or The Godfather III (everything by Sophia Coppola’s performance is better than you remember – her performance is worse).   Heck, maybe he’s seen or read Angels and Demons.  There will be books written and, likely, movies made about him in the coming years. He ascends to the position of pontiff in a very difficult time for the Catholic Church. I cannot think of anyone who would envy him the task.

As far as I know, he didn’t engineer a scheme to rig his election, parachute from a helicopter into St. Peter’s Square, survive a tsunami or slice Darth Maul in half to become Il Papa (I may be getting my Ewan McGregor movies confused).

He may have been one of the men in the room who didn’t want the job.

I hope so.