| Bilgi : The makers of The Da Vinci Code have
been saying for some time now that their film is not supposed
to be taken all that seriously. It's not history, and it's not
theology, director Ron Howard has said; instead, it's just a
rollicking good bit of entertainment. And leading man Tom
Hanks has said it's loaded "with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of
scavenger-hunt-type nonsense," calling the story "a lot of
fun."
If only they had taken their own advice. Dan
Brown's novel may be the product of extremely sloppy
historical study, but even many of the book's critics have
admitted that it is a "page-turner," an exciting yarn that
carries the reader off on a semi-clever, fast-paced ride. The
film, on the other hand, is a dull and plodding bore, and it
takes itself far, far too seriously.
Robert (Tom Hanks) and Sophie
(Audrey Tatou) are on the run
 |
For those who have not yet read the book or
any summaries thereof, the story begins with an albino monk
named Silas (Paul Bettany) shooting Jacques Sauniere
(Jean-Pierre Marielle), the curator of the Louvre museum in
Paris. In his dying moments, Sauniere strips off his clothes,
cuts a symbol into his own flesh, and scrawls some cryptic
messages in invisible ink in various places around the museum.
Police chief Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) summons Robert Langdon
(Tom Hanks), an expert on symbols, to the Louvre and comes to
believe that Langdon might be the killer—but while he is
plotting to arrest Langdon, Sauniere's granddaughter Sophie
Neveu (Audrey Tautou), herself a police officer, helps Langdon
to escape. Langdon and Sophie then run all over France and,
eventually, England, dodging the police while solving the
coded puzzles that Sauniere left behind—puzzles which lead to
a secret society that claims everything Christians believe is
a lie.
The thing to remember about Dan Brown's
novels, and now the adaptations thereof, is that they are
fundamentally silly. Few books have made me laugh out loud as
heartily as Angels & Demons, the first novel to
feature the character of Robert Langdon, in which Langdon
makes the ludicrous claim that Christians "borrowed" the
practice of Holy Communion from the Aztecs—a North American
culture that didn't encounter Christianity until nearly 1,500
years after the life of Jesus. And I have always gotten a
giggle from the Da Vinci Code trailer, in which
Langdon's eccentric friend Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen)
gravely intones that he knows a secret which, if revealed,
would "devastate the very foundations of mankind." Ah, so
grandiose!
Paul Bettany plays the creepy,
murderous, albino monk
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In the movie, however, Teabing says that the
secret he knows would "devastate the very foundations of
Christianity," a much more specific, and offensive,
sort of claim. And the movie, written by Akiva Goldsman (A
Beautiful Mind), seems to go out of its way to give the
story even more historical credibility than the novel
does. One of the amusing things about the book is how Brown
slaps together as many cultural reference points as
possible—from high-brow Renaissance art to popular Disney
cartoons—in a sort of post-modern pastiche to create the
impression that the conspiracies and secret societies he
describes are everywhere around us. But in the film,
everything is played with a very straight face, the
pop-culture allusions are eliminated altogether (as are some
of the book's loopier claims), and our focus stays on the
classic and medieval paintings, sculptures and
architecture.
In addition, Robert Langdon has been made
into more of a skeptic, so that when he talks about the Priory
of Sion (the secret society that is supposedly protecting the
descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene), he refers to them,
at first, as a "myth." He even says the group was exposed as a
"hoax" in 1967—a claim which prompts Teabing to say, "That's
what they want you to believe." Also, in the book,
Teabing says that Mary Magdalene was labeled a "prostitute" by
"the early church" as part of a "smear campaign," and leaves
it at that; but in the film, Langdon specifies A.D. 591 as the
date when Mary Magdalene was formally identified as a
prostitute. (That was the year when Pope Gregory gave a sermon
claiming that Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the "sinful
woman" who washed Jesus' feet were all the same woman.)
Sophie gets the lowdown on the
code from Teabing (Ian McKellen)
|
What's more, Langdon and Teabing now play a
sort of good-cop-bad-cop routine. The book flat-out states
that "five million" (emphasis in the original) women
were killed by the Catholic church over 300 years, and it
states this in a passage that seems to be reflecting Langdon's
own thoughts as he thinks back on the history of the church.
But in the film, Langdon says the number was 50,000, and then
Teabing interjects that some would say the victims actually
numbered in the "millions." Also, when Teabing says that the
emperor Constantine had to intervene in religious matters in
the early 4th century because Christians were rioting against
pagans in the streets (a claim that is brought to visual life
in a brief, violent flashback), Langdon interjects and says
that the pagans might have started the atrocities first—a
claim that is never backed up by anything on the screen. And
the film's version of Langdon explicitly says that Constantine
did not invent the divinity of Jesus—which is almost the exact
opposite of what the book's version of Langdon says.
The changes the film makes to Langdon have a
subtle, even sinister, effect. The book tends to emphasize his
superior knowledge, which could have the effect of distancing
him from the average moviegoer. But the film casts Everyman
actor Tom Hanks in the role, and then makes Langdon a moderate
Everyman who initially finds Teabing's claims too crazy. The
thing is, as far as this story is concerned, Langdon comes to
discover that Teabing, for all his anti-ecclesiastical
kookiness, is actually right. In short, the film is the
story of how Langdon comes to believe in Teabing's theories;
and because Langdon has been made more accessible, he takes
the audience along with him on his journey to this new belief.
And while all this is going on, the film's explicitly
Christian characters—Silas, Fache, and the manipulative Bishop
Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), who takes his own cues from a
mysterious unseen "Teacher"—are all portrayed as pathetic
dupes, let down by their own beliefs.
In one of the final scenes, Langdon tries to
spell out the film's main theme. Referring to the nature of
Jesus, Langdon asks, "Why does it have to be human or divine?"
At this point, I half-expected Tom Hanks to go into Forrest
Gump mode and say, "Maybe it's both"—which would, of
course, be the orthodox position (even if we might quibble
with what the film says about the way Jesus expressed his
humanity during his earthly ministry). But no, instead,
Langdon's next words are, "Maybe human is divine."
Which may be very soothing to the post-modern ear, but it just
begs the questions: What is divinity? What is
humanity?
Alfred Molina as Bishop
Aringarosa
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Given this kind of dialogue, it's impossible
to take the filmmakers seriously when they say that their
movie makes no historical or theological claims. Why did they
feel the need to add details missing from Brown's book, or to
correct some of its errors, if the historical claims didn't
really matter? And would they have been just as pleased with a
closing scene in which Langdon said Jesus is the divine Son of
God who became man to show us how to become the fully human
beings we were originally meant to be? Somehow, I doubt
it.
And what of the entertainment, the rollicking
good thrill ride that the filmmakers say they are trying to
give us? Truth be told, whether it's Silas popping out of
nowhere with a weapon in his hand, or Langdon accidentally
disarming an ally who turns out to be a gun-packing enemy, or
Sophie driving a car backwards through busy traffic, these are
among the movie's weakest and most generic elements. The
performances are all pretty grim, too; only McKellen, as
Teabing, seems to be having any fun. And Howard's direction
emphasizes all the wrong things; the quasi-academic
exposition, which is what has intrigued most fans of the book,
is tossed off so rapidly in places that you almost miss it,
whereas the camera dwells at some length on scenes of the
albino monk's self-flagellation, among other things. Hans
Zimmer's musical score is effective in places, at least, but
it would have been even better if it didn't sound like a
carbon copy of the themes he wrote for Batman
Begins.
Bottom line: If you want an entertaining yarn
about the Knights Templar, historical secrets, and cryptic
codes hidden in famous documents and artifacts, go rent National Treasure. Now there's
a movie that knows how to have fun with an absurd premise—and
it doesn't spread falsehoods about the Church that have
already undermined the faith of many Christians. The best
thing that can be said about The Da Vinci Code is that
it is such a dud, it just might help to bring this phenomenon
to an end. And the sooner, the better. |
