The DaVinci Code

The Da Vinci Code poster When I was about seven years old I went deer hunting with my dad. Now deer hunting is a late fall, deep winter project, and you must rise well before dawn to be in the hunt when the animals are on the move. It can be bitter cold, and to a kid it can be boring waiting for the sun to come up so you can see what's around you. My dad and I were sitting in our car parked on a sindera (a deer path), with a rifle stuck out each window waiting to blow Bambi's brains out, when I asked my father why he didn't go to church like mom did (it must've been a Sunday morning). My father's reply is seared in my memory even to this day. He said, "I don't always go to church because I believe that even a savage in the jungle bowing down to a stone is praying in his way to the same God that I am." Believe me, such a frank statement of religious tolerance was a shock and a revelation to a child of '50s Bible Belt America. I have recounted this story to a few friends over the years always adding the tagline that, "Little did my father know that I would grow up to be such a savage bowing down to a stone in the jungle."

I tell this personal story here because all the hubbub over the release of The DaVinci Code movie has reminded me of that old, narrow and oppressive element in the otherwise universal religious impulse. I must confess that I am fascinated by the human need for religion. I suppose that when you grow up as close to Nature as I did, the need to lay on extra layers of symbols and superstitions seems a waste of energy. The circle of life is there to be observed, understood and embraced. There is very little need for anything else. Yet even a cursory reading of history shows that inordinate amounts of blood and treasure, to say nothing of the energy involved in evangelizing, have been expended to promote one idea of God over another. I would like to believe that this dark side of religion is a late development associated with the monotheistic, patriarchal, imperialist religions, but I admit there's plenty of evidence that wars were fought with the idea of "God on our side," even before the advent of capital-G God.

I read The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail when it first came out in the early 1980s. At the urging of a friend, I read The DaVinci Code when it came out in '03. Of the two books, I thought the first to be the better effort at storytelling. The novel seemed to me a bit of a clunker as a piece of literature, although it worked beautifully as a conspiratorial page-turner. At the time of Holy Blood's publication I was fortunate enough to have a friend who was profoundly knowledgeable of the history of the Templars. Smelling a pretty rank hoax in the whole Priory of Sion / Les Dossier Secrets / Father Sauniere part of the book, I questioned my friend about it. He confirmed for me that the alleged Priory history was improbable at best, and very likely a fairy tale and a con job that would probably destroy the authors' reputations. There were two hooks, though, that caused both books to sell. The first, of course, was the shocking (to the orthodox) idea that Jesus could've married and fathered a child. The second was the conspiracist interpretation of European history that posited an on-going battle between the institutional Church, headquartered in Rome, and the sub rosa keepers of the holy bloodline. Conspiracy theory has been a rising tide since at least the late 1970s, and I believe it is a natural outgrowth of the Information Revolution. After all, when you suffer from a constant barrage of new data, most of it packaged to alarm in order to call attention to itself, it can be supremely comforting to believe that someone somewhere, even if malign, is In Control. So the timing of these two books' appearance on the scene more or less guaranteed some level of success. The controversial alternative history of Jesus could be largely ignored with the first book, but twenty years later, with the advent of the novel, the idea had been around long enough to catch the wave that turned The DaVinci Code into a publishing phenomenon.

By my count, some forty hours of programming on television were devoted to The DaVinci Code and related issues in the week of the movie's release. I estimate that that is about double what was programmed around the release of Gibson's Passion. Almost all of what I sampled of these programs was devoted to denying any validity to the book, and the reviews of the movie by professional critics were almost universally scathing. Even the SciFi Channel's program on DVC had more preachers denying the book and the movie than conspiracy buffs supporting them. Only Ebert & Roper among the critics gave the movie a positive review, and they did so in the context that it was too frivolous an effort to take seriously. As I said, all this hubbub is a bit astonishing to me. Obviously, The DaVinci Code is not a movie that believing Christians will want to see. The main question for the rest of us is simply whether director Ron Howard could create a suspenseful movie when everyone in the potential audience knows how it ends.

I believe that Ron Howard has crafted the best movie that could be made of this book. My take on what he has done here is that he has re-imagined the story as modern retelling of the Grail legend. There is a knight and a lady, a wizard (McKellen's character), and a secret portending power. The novel The DaVinci Code is just a skeleton for the real story, which is a new take on The Grail Quest. (I suspect that professional critics may have missed this aspect in their unflattering reviews.) The story arc is suspenseful enough, even if the pace is not the usual frenetic Hollywood fare. The DaVinci Code is not nearly so convoluted and inscrutable a movie as Howard's much acclaimed A Beautiful Mind. The screenplay by Akiva Goldman does a great job of smoothing out a lot of rough edges from the book, in my opinion. Because of all the historical background the book involves, this must've been an extremely difficult screenplay to write. Not that the historical elements can't be dramatic and exciting, but the amount of information compression involved to translate the book to movie form must've been daunting to both Howard and Goldman. I think they managed to deliver a movie that is unexpectedly affecting.

The acting here has been much criticized, but I found the performances of the three principals and the supporting cast to be not only well executed, but quite successful at bringing the book's characters to life. Tom Hanks strikes exactly the right note as Professor Robert Langdon, giving him all the qualities one would expect in a Harvard professor suddenly caught up in a murder investigation which brings his life's work out of the ivory tower. He gives a refined, mature performance that works as a nice counterpoint to Ian McKellen's Leigh Teabing, the English eccentric Langdon turns to for help. It is worth the price of admission to see McKellen chew up the scenery, as they say, in frequent soliloquies that give us the expositional necessities. Ron Howard makes nice use of visual flashbacks as Teabing lectures, thus making all the talking more interesting. In what I am sure was meant as a conciliatory gesture to Christians by Howard, Teabing is hauled away in chains babbling incoherently about "the conspiracy" when his own crimes are exposed. Audrey Tautou as Sophie Neveu has been lambasted as not up to the level of the rest of the cast, but I found her performance as the tightly wound police cryptologist trying to understand the murder of her grandfather and its aftermath both credible and edifying. I think if I found out I was descended directly from the Son of God, I would be a bit more overwhelmed than she is at the end, but I am not a tightly wound police cryptologist. Actually, Ms. Tautou should be proud that she held her own on a screen filled with such luminaries as Hanks, McKellen, Jean Reno (Inspector Fache), and the magnificent Alfred Molina in the small role of Cardinal Aringarosa. Also, Paul Bettany gives an absolutely cold-blooded performance as Silas, the albino murdering monk. The Catholic Church is portrayed as the embodiment of evil in this story, but there are no gratuitous potshots leveled in Howard's rendering of these characters. I found the acting in this movie to be uniformly superb.

Visually you can't ask for more from a motion picture than you get in The DaVinci Code. The interiors are all art and architecture, the exteriors are Paris, London and Scotland. If nothing else DVC is a visual feast. The movie has almost persuaded me that I. M. Pei's glass pyramid is not "a scar on the face of Paris."

So I recommend seeing The DaVinci Code. Robert Langdon's quest leads him into that which the orthodox call heresy, but he finds something to revere in the end. That is the transformational catharsis that we expect in a good drama, and which I suspect most of us yearn for in our lives. Kudos to Ron Howard for making a controversial subject both palatable and artful, and to Hanks for creating a hero for our time.

As for me, I remain profoundly grateful that I learned everything I need to know about religion going hunting with my dad.