It doesn't get much better than this.
Author: metaphor-2 from United States
16 April 1999
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
A murder mystery set in a medieval monastery, this film manages to be intriguing, amusing, thrilling and terrifying.
It was adapted from the first novel by the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, a book concerned with the monopolization of knowledge. Eco approached this subject by concocting a series of mysterious deaths that occur in an isolated monastery, which eventually prove to revolve around a small coterie of disobedient monks who are partaking of a forbidden book. This leads to the discovery of the monastery's great secret, a vast hidden library where the knowledge of the ages is being allowed to rot away by authorities who hoard the books on the paternalistic justification that the knowledge they contain is too dangerous for ordinary people to possess.
The library is a vast maze, and being lost in it is one of the novel's central episodes. (The maze theme, and particularly the library-as-maze, is one Eco shares with Jorge Luis Borges, and it feels here almost like the baton passed from one marathon-runner to the next.) It is a novel filled with the love of books themselves, and dressed in a stunning evocation of one of the bleakest periods in the intellectual history of the last 2000 years.Jean Jacques Annaud's masterful adaptation of this book wisely retains some of the novel's elements, and transmutes others into terms far better suited to the medium of film.
Annaud creates the milieu of the monastery, bleak, dank, claustrophobic, almost drained of life, brilliantly. (This film is the only way I'd ever want to visit a 13th century monastery.) The suppression of individualism that is part and parcel of this monastic life is the obvious outward expression of the mindset that would suppress the product of centuries of human thought and writing. Into it he brings William of Baskerville, excellently cast and wonderfully played by Sean Connery... a man who appears to be a monk solely because it is the only occupation in which he had the opportunity to study and exercise his mind.
An obvious pre-cursor to Sherlock Holmes, William believes his eyes and ears, even when they contradict doctrine and the Official Line. He is brought in by the Abbott to explain deaths and quiet the rumors... before the impending visit of a notoriously ruthless official of the Inquisition. To the Abbott's great dismay, William dismisses an easy explanation and instead seeks to unravel the mystery. And coming ever closer is hovering threat of The Inquisition, which is eventually embodied on screen by the sinister F. Murray Abraham.
Where Annaud's film departs from the novel is in shifting the emphasis away from "the suppression of books" as the central theme. It remains a powerful symbol, but it is not required to stand on its own for the idea behind it. It is touched on in a wonderful scene where William first enters the library/maze and realizes what's hidden there, books he's heard legends of and longed to read his whole life, and he becomes totally giddy with the joy of this discovery. But the seduction of the maze, the high-point of the novel, is a distinctly literary effect, and Annaud and his writers shrewdly perceived that it would be rather flat on screen.
Instead, they center on the suppression of Free Thinking by the Inquisition, and the ruthless forms of terrorism employed to intimidate the "useful" minds into staying in their place, and thinking only what they are told. The human drama of the flames of the Inquisition "read" far more effectively on film than the intellectual drama of the imprisoned books, and that is driving force that makes the film, in its own medium, every bit as effective as the book.In all, this film is an entertainment for the mind as well as the senses, filled with remarkable performances an indelible visions.
