|
|
The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard. Columbia Pictures, 2006, 149 minutes.
Jesus’ Baby Mama Drama by Eric Kenning
“I have to get to a library fast!” isn’t a line you often hear in Hollywood thrillers. It sums up the combination of pulp esotericism (ANCIENT MYSTERIES REVEALED!) and formulaic suspense that turned Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” into a perfect cultural storm and turns the movie version by director Ron Howard into a mad, occasionally exhilarating rush to nowhere in particular. In what isn’t its only anticlimax, Tom Hanks’ character, Professor Robert Langdon, never actually gets to a library (which he does in the book). At least Humphrey Bogart, who had to get to a bookstore fast in “The Big Sleep,” actually made it to one and had a tryst with the sexy (when she took off her glasses and undid her hair) bookstore clerk besides. There are no trysts, no sexual sparks, between Hanks and his co-star, the fetching French actress Audrey Tautou, or between anyone and anyone in the movie, including Jesus and Mary Magdalene, despite the plot-engine suggestion that they were a 1st-century item. But the movie isn’t trying to generate sexual sparks, just pseudo-intellectual ones — it works by creating the impression that it’s giving you something to think about while not giving you any time to think, much less get to a library.
| | Eric Kenning
is a freelance writer living in New York. |
|
What made the book unique among thrillers and, with 40 million copies sold worldwide, the publishing equivalent of breaking into Fort Knox, was not, of course, the contrived plot in which cardboard characters make hairbreadth escapes from villainous clichés while on an unbelievable quest for something preposterous. It was the cramming into its 400-plus pages large heaps of theological and historical exposition, conjecture, legend, and flapdoodle.
To read the novel is to learn a great many facts, several of them true. And to be coaxed into feeling that you’re in on a really big ancient conspiracy, solving puzzles and cracking codes and seeing through the subterfuges of the oldest institution on earth, the Roman Catholic church, along the way. Pagan symbolism incorporated into Christian images and holy days, early controversies about the divinity of Christ, Church councils, weird heresies, unheard-of gospels, the sacred feminine, the ambiguous story of Mary Magdalene, the demoting of women in the early church, cryptic details in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci . . . all this was news to many of the book’s readers, and some of it was news to scholars working in the fields.
Much of this material is just about as interesting when conveyed in Brown‘s breathless, if not exactly deathless, prose as it is when Elaine Pagels or one of his other scholarly sources is talking about it. The problem is that the revelations that set the plot in motion, such as the existence of a venerable secret society called the Priory of Sion that included Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton, the premise that the medieval Knights Templar had been created to protect its secrets, Mary Magdalene’s flight to France and the birth of her child there, and a royal line of descendants, were all derived from a hoax perpetrated in the 1950s by a Frenchman named Pierre Plantard and a 1980s “nonfiction” bestseller, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” written by an unholy trinity of Englishmen.
|
| The screenwriter wasn’t about to tamper with a text sacred to millions (the Dan Brown novel, that is, not the Bible).
|
|
The movie eliminates all but a few shreds of the book’s real (if sometimes distorted) history, leaving the counterfeit currency. But it has to be said that it serves up its fast-food fabulism in a rich sauce of authentic locations and stunning architecture, plus competent acting that puts some flesh on the two-dimensional characters of the book. (It made $224 million worldwide on its first weekend, setting records in Italy and Spain.)
If you aren’t one of the 40 million-plus initiates who have read the book, the plot of both book and movie begins with the murder of an elderly curator at the Louvre. After having been fatally wounded by a gunshot, he somehow has time to undress, draw cryptic symbols and write coded messages with a marker on and around his naked body while arranging it in the spread-eagled posture of da Vinci’s universal man. He was to have met Robert Langdon, “Professor of Religious Symbology” at Harvard, that night, and the tenacious police captain assigned to the case has reason to think the American professor committed the murder. The captain is a member of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic lay organization. It turns out that members of Opus Dei, including a fanatically devout albino monk named Silas, are involved with a suave Portuguese bishop and a mysterious “Teacher” in an elaborate plot to track down and kill the leadership of the clandestine Priory of Sion, which is harboring the secret that would overturn two millennia of history and threaten the existence of the church.
Langdon is saved from imminent arrest at the Louvre by the intervention of a police cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, who turns out to have been raised by the murdered curator. Together they flee, with both cops and Silas in pursuit, first to a bank to obtain a cryptex (a cylinder containing documents that can be opened only by knowing the right code) kept by the Priory in a safe deposit box, then to visit an eccentric aristocratic Englishman named Sir Leigh Teabing at his estate outside Paris, where, armed with books and audiovisual devices, he runs through a two-minute drill about the Council of Nicaea, the Crusades, witch hunts, da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and the ancient legend of the Holy Grail, and then on to London, pursuers still pursuing, to solve the Grail mysteries once and for all.
Playing Langdon, the unlikely professorial hero, Hanks strikes a balance between a somewhat unconvincing aura of scholarly knowledge plus flashes of Sherlock Holmes-caliber deductive brilliance and his more typical wry, modest, not-sure-what-he’s-getting-into persona. Tautou, as Sophie, who in the novel gets to solve many of the puzzles, has little to do here but look puzzled, though she also drives a vehicle backward through Paris traffic and sidewalk cafes with a supernatural dexterity that might descend directly from the miracles of the New Testament, except that Jesus didn’t have a smart car.
| At least Humphrey Bogart, who had to get to a bookstore fast in “The Big Sleep,” actually made it to one, and had a tryst with the sexy bookstore clerk besides.
|
|
The veteran French actor Jean Reno is very good indeed as Bezu Fache, the tenacious Paris police captain whose traps Langdon and Neveu keep escaping. Ian McKellen gives the somber movie a lift into something momentarily close to comedy-of-manners levity as Sir Leigh. And as the albino ascetic Silas, Paul Bettany doesn’t have much to do but grimace and flagellate himself, but he does get to speak Latin with the scheming bishop (Alfred Molina), and he’s convincingly pale.
The screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, who won an Oscar collaborating with Howard on “A Beautiful Mind,” wasn’t about to tamper with a text sacred to millions (the Dan Brown novel, that is, not the Bible). The movie just speed-dials the book at every point. The narrow escapes are as implausible as the conspiratorial history, but they all go by so fast that they hardly matter, and you can actually enjoy yourself, and the ecclesiastical architecture, on your way to a conclusion that is (in both book and movie) placid and anticlimactic, given the apocalyptic tremors that preceded it.
As for heresy, the movie is a bit of a disappointment. A gnostic gospel or two is quoted, but the imaginative, paradox-loving heresy itself doesn’t get into the screen version. The film doesn’t really earn burning at the stake or other forms of theological refutation. It does imply that Jesus was only a man, “an extraordinary teacher,” as Langdon puts it, but a mortal man. But the point is blurred amid all the nonsense, and it simply isn’t worth protesting, as some Christian groups have done, or hedging, as Goldsman and Howard have done by having Hanks deliver a little speech: “Why is it always human or divine? Maybe human is divine . . . What really matters is what you believe,” etc. Nobody is going to walk into this movie an orthodox Christian and walk out an Arian or gnostic or monophysite.
Maybe Jesus was married during those unaccounted-for years before he began his ministry. Any devout Jewish man of the time would have been. Maybe Mary Magdalene, who wasn’t a redeemed prostitute (a fable made up in the 6th century), was among Jesus’ closest disciples, and the early church was uncomfortable with that fact and almost wrote her out of the story. But I wouldn’t bet the farm, or Dan Brown’s royalties, on her making her way from Jerusalem to France with a bun in the oven, or on the royal and conspiratorial consequences thereof. The basic premise of the book and the movie is such hokum that you can‘t take even their seriousness seriously. And this isn’t to knock hokum. It has its place, and its place is Hollywood (though unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the major studios, religion and politics still dominate the hokum field). You need a large infusion of hokum to make your escapist formulas work, and mainstream movies are always going to be about escape, which includes escape from the coercive hokum of religion and politics. You might as well relax and enjoy “The Da Vinci Code” for what it is, and for what it isn’t. It isn’t the gospel truth, not even the Gnostic gospel truth. It’s a couple of hours of release from the truth, from reality. It’s Dan Brown multiplied by Hollywood. It’s extravagant nonsense on expensive stilts.
|
| | |
|
