I saw The Da Vinci Code. It was okay, as conspiracy thrillers go. The critics were pretty damn harsh — overly so. Didn’t you read the damn book? Dan Brown makes Clive Cussler read like F. Scott Cussler. The book was great pulp, but very talky, so making a movie was always going to be a challenge. Sure, it could have been better, but it’s okay.
(Although I found Paul Bettany as Silas the Killer Albino Monk to be terrible, and I usually love him.)
(PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW)
What makes it more important is the controversy. Religious folks have subjected The Da Vinci Code to fact checking like this. They’re upset because the book claims:
- Jesus is not God; he was only a man.
- Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
- She is to be worshipped as a goddess.
- Jesus got her pregnant, and the two had a daughter.
- That daughter gave rise to a prominent family line that is still present in Europe today.
- The Bible was put together by a pagan Roman emperor.
- Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was deified by the emperor Constantine.
- The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.
- In the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church.
- There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and is trying to keep the truth alive.
- The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed. It often has committed murder to do so.
- The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing.
I love the delicacy of that phrase: “Jesus got her pregnant…” I guess “Jesus knocked her up” would have been too direct. “He lay with her,” perhaps?
Our hero, Robert Langdon, is a little more skeptical in the movie than he is in the book. Quite frankly, it’s hard to see what the brouhaha is about. All of the explosive stuff about Jesus and Mary is related by Teabing, who is a liar and a murderer. He claims it’s all fact, but where’s the beef? Proving it would involve (I presume) involve getting DNA from Mary’s body (now buried below the Louvre), but what good is that without also having Jesus’ DNA?
But that doesn’t matter. Faith is a matter of faith and the Bible indicates that God has made it so. So, let’s ignore matters of theology and stick to history. The Da Vinci Code is a lot of nonsense on that score; anybody who makes any kind of spiritual decision based on the book is a moron. All of the information about on the Priory of Sion and Rennes-le-Château makes for fascinating reading, but it’s crap. (Read about it here and here.) A lot of the stuff about decoding Da Vinci’s painting is also bogus. This is okay for a work of fiction, but not worth getting worked up about.
Of course, if I worked at Opus Dei, I’d be plenty pissed off…
Read more about conservative criticism of the film here.
Big secret here, don’t read if you haven’t read the book or if you want to watch the movie…
Do you find it at all weird that they run all the way to England, when it turns out the object of their search is right down the hall from where they start?
Tags: The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, Priory of Sion, Rennes-le-Château
2 Responses
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The Pop View Says:
I was talking to my friend Dave about the film and he made some useful comments about Tom Hanks‘ performance as Langdon. Dave thinks the problem is that Hanks was trying to be too realistic, that he was doing a real academic, which then comes off as boring. Instead, Dave proposed two different ways Hanks could have approached the role.
Langdon has a line at some point about how he has always studied history and now he’s living it. You don’t see that spark in Hanks, that he’s moved from the academic world of studying symbols into a place where he’s unraveling one of the biggest mysteries of all time.
Conversely, Hanks could have played it as a man who has always been in the academic world, working only with words and pictures, and now he’s plunged into a situation where he’s in danger of being imprisoned for murder and then ends up on the run for his life. It would be the classic Hitchcock scenario of an ordinary man who steps into a nightmare.
The one actor that Hanks is most often compared to is Jimmy Stewart. In fact, people often say that Hanks is our generation’s Stewart, the ordinary, decent man that represents us all. But imagine Stewart playing this role. He would have been great. Stewart excelled at the ordinary man in extraordinary situations and would have been fantastic as Langdon.
Also, for a comparison of how the book’s message was softened for the film, read this analysis. However, this guy thinks the movie was more aggressive than the book.
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The Aforementioned Dave Says:
Of course, I agree with you here, but you have misremembered something… and for a very good reason! In fact, the logic of your mistake just goes to show how badly the filmmakers dropped the ball with this adaptation.
“Langdon has a line at some point about how he has always studied history and now he’s living it.”
It is Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabing that has this line, not Hanks — not the actual main character of your movie!
I mean, honestly, isn’t this screenwriting 101? Wouldn’t any big time producer worth his or her salt try to “protect” their star? Don’t studio executives live to give this sort of note? Haven’t Ron Howard and Tom Hanks made enough movies by now to understand the basics?
You always hear stories about the meddling nature of movie development and how many of the above people drive each other nuts with wanting to change stuff, but in this case, that note would have been, I think, a good catch.