Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation -- or "palimpsest," as he prefers to call it -- of what must surely be one of the most unread, or partially read, of contemporary best-sellers, Umberto Eco's murder mystery set in a 14th-century Benedictine abbey. The mystery element, minus most of the linguistic and historical and philosophical and theological elements, emerges more cleanly and engrossingly on screen, and the labyrinthine library of the place is impressively visualized. But a lot has been lost in translation. For starters, it means something less, or different, for a movie, rather than a book, to pay tribute to a book as a motive for murder. (This wasn't too convincing in the novel in the first place.) And it doesn't help to have the characters depicted -- with the notable exceptions of the tan and vital Sean Connery as a Franciscan Sherlock Holmes and the smooth-cheeked Christian Slater as his callow Watson -- as Felliniesque grotesques. The superior humanness and humorousness of the hero are already abundantly apparent without turning all those around him into ghouls and gargoyles. With F. Murray Abraham, Michel Lonsdale, and William Hickey. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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