The Da Vinci Code – Jason Warburg

The soundtrack, we’ll get to — but first, a word
about the film.

The long-awaited fiim version of Dan Brown’s
bestseller The Da Vinci Code has received remarkably
lukewarm reviews. It’s hard, in reading them, not to sense an
undercurrent of disdain. Tom Hanks’ hair is too long, the story is
too esoteric, the French actress (playing a Frenchwoman — quel
suprise!) doesn’t speak in perfect American English. Truth be told,
The Code is more challenging than your average summer
shoot-’em-up — it requires that you not just be a passive
observer, but actually think while watching.

Still, one of the biggest issues for many of the
critics is likely the book from which the movie has been adapted.
I’ll mount an honest defense here. The first time I started reading
The Da Vinci Code, I found Dan Brown’s prose so purple and
overwrought that I had to put it down after 10 pages. Brown is
about as much a literary craftsman as Tom Clancy is, which is to
say, not at all. Both “writers” might more properly be categorized
as storytellers, whose books stand or fall on the strength of their
intricate, imaginative plots. For all its literary failings, The
Da Vinci Code is a superbly plotted tale full of imaginative
ideas and puzzles and twists that make for engrossing reading. As
for why critics, literary or otherwise, might be frustrated with a
second-rate wordsmith scoring the biggest royalty checks of the new
century — well, that’s a sentence fragment that *is* a complete
thought.

Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack is a fitting accomplice to
the move version of The Code, mining the appropriate tonal
nexus between beauty and bombast, holy and unholy.

The opening track — “Dies Mercurii I Martius” —
which plays under the titles, alternates artfully between sparse,
intricate passages befitting a story about puzzles, and broad,
sweeping ones befitting a blockbuster Hollywood movie. (The track
titles alternate – as does the movie itself – between Latin, French
and English.)

Several tracks feel like church music on steroids –
that is, lyrical string movements taken beyond natural limits of
tempo and vigor to achieve a fierce intensity (“L’Esprit Des
Gabriel”), or soaring, beatific choral arrangements — often
employing Gregorian chants — that nonetheless ring with menace (in
particular, “Salvete Virgines” and “Poisoned Chalice”).

“Beneath Alsrica” does an especially effective job of
taking the sort of spare string arrangement one might expect to
hear between portions of Sunday mass and fuel-injecting it with a
steady-building tension that builds into a kind of frenetic
grandeur, underscoring the ultimate discoveries made at the movie’s
climax.

Zimmer’s work here reflects its subject matter
effectively while granting extra weight and tension to key scenes
in the film, as any good score should. Whatever you may think of
the film itself, the score succeeds on all counts.