The Name of the Rose (1986)

The Name of the Rose arrives in 1986 with Sean Connery in a tonsure, Christian Slater as his apprentice, and a body count that accumulates with monastic patience. Jean-Jacques Annaud spent four years assembling a multi-ethnic cast of distinctive faces, and the result treats the fourteenth century as a lived-in place rather than a costume drama. The murders are solved by deduction, the library is a labyrinth, and the Inquisition arrives on schedule to ruin everything. It is a handsome production and a grim one.

The social consciousness on display is mild and largely incidental. Annaud insisted on a black actor, Urs Althaus, as the translator Venantius, against the objections of American casting agencies, a gesture that registers as thoughtful without ever hardening into a thesis. The film never pauses to comment on it, which is to its credit. The abbey hoards its books and its gold while peasants outside trade their dignity for bread, though that critique belongs to medieval monasticism and not to any modern economic sermon. The one woman of consequence exists to awaken Adso and then to be tortured, and the film concedes in its closing narration that she never even earned a name.

Where the novel argued, the film mostly prowls. Umberto Eco complained that the adaptation kept the lettuce and discarded the theology and the politics, and he was correct, though the residue is a better movie than his sandwich metaphor suggests. What survives is atmosphere, poison on the page, and a burning library. The sermonizing is confined to a few exchanges about whether Christ ever laughed, a modest dose for a film about heresy. The whole enterprise holds its ideas loosely and its candlelight beautifully, which is a defensible way to spend two hours.