The
Da Vinci Code
Directed by Ron Howard
Sony Pictures, May 2006
Review by Melanie Fletcher.
I freely admit, I'm a sucker for religious thrillers. Maybe it's due to three years of Catholic grammar school, my mom's fascination with religious history, or seeing THE OMEN at an impressionable age, I dunno, but the end result is that I adore stories that involve the Catholic church, mysterious goings-on, and at least one splashy supernatural event.
So of course I read The Da Vinci Code. And lo, my reaction was, "...eh." I already knew the McGuffin from reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail, wasn't overly shocked by it, and was more taken aback by a so-so book becoming such a bestseller. When I found out that Ron Howard (COCOON, APOLLO 13) was filming it, however, I thought this might turn out to be one of those rare cases where the movie turns out to be better than the book.
And indeed, the first 129 minutes of THE DA VINCI CODE are moderately entertaining, apart from the occasional oddity such as Sophie Neveau becoming occupationally stupid (why is a police cryptographer asking a religious symbols professor to break an anagram?), and Langdon being much more devout. Generally, though, it all hung together, and for 129 minutes I thought DVC would turn out to be a perfectly acceptable summer flick.
Then I saw the last ten minutes, which pretty much had me screaming to myself for the rest of the day. This is going to be a spoilerific review, so skip this if you don't want to know why my head almost exploded.
All righty, then. In the end of the book, Sophie (newly revealed as Jesus's many-times-great-granddaughter) is finally reunited with her brother, who's been in hiding with their grandmother all these years under the Priory of Sion's protection. After the tearful family reunion, Sophie makes a date for a dirty weekend in Venice with Langdon. Her approving grandmother, a high-ranking member of the Priory, gives Langdon some hints on the location of the Grail; the good professor heads back to Paris, has an epiphany, tracks down the ancient Rose Line and realizes that the Grail (aka the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene) is buried under the inverted glass pyramid in the Louvre Museum.
That's how the book ends. In the movie, however:
- Sophie is the only living descendant of Jesus, despite the astounding family resemblance of the docent at the Roslin Chapel (who, in the book, turns out to be her brother).
- Sauniere wasn't really her grandfather (he "rescues" her from the accident that killed her family; none of the cops ever questioned an old man walking away from an accident scene with a little girl in his arms. This also neatly sidesteps the book's Priory ritual where Sophie sees Granddad having sex with someone, because God forbid the offspring of Jesus should ever engage in rumpy-pumpy).
- Sophie's gran, instead of being a powerful member of the Priory, becomes some simpering thing whose only purpose for Sophie is to "welcome her home." Gah.
- After spending most of the movie as a smart, tough policewoman and cryptographer, Sophie turns into this sexless icon who needs to be protected by the Priory, the members of which don't look like they could protect a snow cone from a herd of preschoolers.
- In a 180 degree turnaround from the book, Langdon opines that hey, just because Jesus had a wife and kids doesn't mean he wasn't divine, advises Sophie in a roundabout manner to be a good little Christian and protect people's faith, and seals his instructions with a chaste kiss on her forehead. There is no mention of fun and games in Venice.
- How does Langdon find the Grail? The grandmother knows bupkis — in fact, the Priory apparently thinks the secret of the Grail has disappeared with the death of the three seneschals and Grand Master. No, Langdon figures it out all by his lonesome by cutting his face while shaving, staring at a trail of blood in the sink, then frantically flipping through his own textbook until he finds a reference to a "blood trail" which clues him into Paris's Rose Line, the Louvre and its secret inhabitant.
*facepalm*
Look, I understand that sometimes a book needs to be drastically changed in order to make it filmable. But when a movie spends 129 minutes being relatively faithful to its source material, then completely screws the pooch on the ending, I have to wonder if there aren't other agendas at play.
Such as, oh, downplaying the whole "Mary Magdalene was really a disciple/Jesus's wife/chosen leader of the church" bit — I can only presume someone was afraid it might give the girls uppity ideas. The one thing that made the book bearable to me was its suggestion that male and female religious power should be balanced, and that Jesus chose a woman to run his church because he believed in that balance. Howard's ending, however, neatly puts paid to that wild and crazy idea, what with Sophie suddenly turning into a graduate from a purity ball. And what the hell happened with the grandmother? In the book, she was portrayed as a high-ranking Priory member, and possibly the next Grand Master — here, she's just a doddering old dear who also had to be protected by the Priory. And with Langdon as the only person to know the location of the Grail, Howard puts this symbol of religious gender equality into the keeping of a man who, earlier in the movie, implies that the emperor Augustine was forced to unite the Roman Empire under Christianity because those nasty male and female-worshipping pagans started performing atrocities (whereas the bad guy suggests that the Christians started it. Nice piece of propaganda there, Ron).
Ultimately, THE DA VINCI CODE winds up as a mindbogglingly conservative "Christian/Man = good, Freethinker/Woman = bad" crapfest, coddling all those cherished fundamentalist beliefs about women either being helpless virgins or contemptible whores, and dumping all over the whole point of Brown's take on the Grail story — that the Magdalene was not only Jesus's wife and mother of his children, but the person he chose to run his church, Jesus being the world's first male feminist.
(Tangentially, it does lead me to imagine Jesus's initial reaction to all of this if He came back today: namely, "You called my wife a what?")
Despite my opinion of the book, I do respect Dan Brown for having the stones to come up with a controversial hypothesis and stick to it. This piece of fundie-placating garbage, however, is just plain insulting to higher life forms everywhere.
