Free Odd Jobs by John Updike Page B

young female, is all male, and most of the men are ugly. The scene is a masterpiece of desolation, an abbey in the wintry remoteness of mountains in the North of Italy; the opening and closing shots panoramically establish something we tend to forget about the Middle Ages—how relatively empty their Europe was, a continent of populated islands connected by thin and perilous paths. Desolation without, desolation within: the stony walls and slanting courtyards of the abbey look cold, and as the actors speak their breath is white. Only the wandering Franciscan William of Baskerville and his accompanying novice, Adso, do not appear grotesque; the rest are robed, eye-rolling residents of a frosty hell claiming to be a path to heaven. Such a gloomy, almost sardonic bleakness lifts the film into the realm of intellectual enterprise.
    One of the pleasant surprises of the picture is how Sean Connery, the swashbuckling 007 of the James Bond soft-porn thrillers, carries off thedifficult lead part, bodying forth our detective-hero’s necessary dignity and trustworthiness while conveying also the something troubled and flawed about him, a rational man in a century, the fourteenth, dominated by murderous superstition and a tortuous church-state rivalry. Eco’s fascinating and sometimes fatiguing explication of late-medieval theological debates—the wild heresies, the incipient rebellion against a totalitarian church, the precarious position of the Franciscan movement itself—is necessarily skimped, but not ignored. The shudder of a rotten world on the verge of upheaval is felt. The extravagant costuming of the Pope’s emissaries, when they erupt upon the bleak monastic scene, constitutes visual farce worthy of Brecht.
    Umberto Eco’s text is full of ironies, and motion pictures do not have leisure, generally, to be ironical. What in the novel is mandarin parody—two travelling monks as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, the isolated abbey as a closed “country house” for a classic murder mystery—the movie takes more or less straight; the clichés simply excite us, as they often have before. The plot is rather clearer than in the novel, because less surrounded by exposition and Latinate discourse, and the book’s central irony—a succession of murders that do not link up but turn out to be, like the Godless universe itself, the work of many chancy happenings—is lost in the visual tumble, one fright after another, that we as moviegoers expect. The movie makes less sense than only the most artful of suspense films, and we do not begrudge it its strain of incoherence, even to the miraculous escape of William from the burning library; he must have used the secret stairway carefully diagrammed in the novel but scarcely mentioned in the film, whose makers must have concluded that one secret passageway—the one leading from the chapel altar, with a carved skull’s eyes as its door latch—was enough. In place of diagrams and deductive brilliance, we have the brilliance of the set designers who constructed the labyrinthine library with its big pale vellum-bound volumes, its musty angled surfaces, and its Piranesiesque tangle of staircases. The set is splendid but its conflagration is relatively perfunctory; the scholarly Eco’s vision of a massive and sickening loss of historic texts cannot be shared by the makers of films, for whom waste—of “takes,” of abandoned and ruthlessly revised scripts, of time, of money—is inextricable from the artistic process. A movie is itself a flickering flame, a piece of visible consumption.
    Yet movies have their rigors: in a book, with its negligible budget, the author’s wishes dominate; but in a motion picture the wishes of the audienceshape the product. What we wish to happen, will happen. As film-goers we know that the abbey must burn, because it is hopelessly polluted, and its confusions can be satisfyingly dealt with only through destruction. The primitive ethical logic of film demands,