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The Da Vinci Code May 21, 2006 |
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A lot of people have read “The Da Vinci Code” in the past three years, and I’m not one of them. Apparently it’s a page turner, as some have told me, and apparently it has a neat little mystery plot going for it about the true origins of Christianity and Jesus hidden within various Leonardo Da Vinci masterpieces, but I wouldn’t know, because I’m a stubborn reader, and a bit of a snob, so when everyone and their brother is conforming to a book so mass marketed you could pick up a copy at your local pet store, I made a pact with myself to stay away, out of respect for rebellion, and the fact that religious mystery is hardly my cup of tea. Having not read the book, I was going into Ron Howard’s big screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s opus cold, with little more than a general summary from Wikipedia, and various industry reports about the location filming and the secrecy of which the project, out of fear of piracy (I guess), was kept under wraps. Did this lack of knowledge of the book hurt my screening of the two and a half hour film? In a way, yes, because of the nature of the plot, which is a bit confusing, I had to catch up on what everybody else already knew, thus making the already heavy-handed dialogue seem like one line of exposition after another, but to suggest that not reading a book before seeing a movie is an excuse for not understanding the movie is a major cop out, after all, I didn’t need to read “Gone With the Wind”, “Jaws”, and “The Godfather” to recognize three of the best films ever made. So, with no comparisons to the actual text of the famous novel to go on, I will commence in trying to figure out the movie on it’s own merits for the remainder of this piece, satisfied with my read of the images I saw, the interesting, if convoluted plot I comprehended, and the expository dialogue that I heard coming from some of the best actors working today. It’s a difficult experience, and honestly, I’m not sure if it was a good one or not (the term “on the fence” comes to mind), but let’s see if we can work it out together. International superstar Tom Hanks stars for director Howard as an Ivy League symbologist named Robert Langdon who, one night after giving a lecture on religious symbolism in artwork, is summoned to the Louvre, where the curator has been murdered, and strange symbols have been smeared on his corpse. Being a master puzzle reader, Langdon notices a few things about the body, one, that he’s spread in a similar fashion to Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man sketch, two, that the symbol on his chest is an ancient Pagan symbol for woman, and three, that he appears to have left various clues, including a “Fibonacci” numbers sequence, to be decoded by Langdon, who he was to meet for supper, had he not been murdered and all. For Langdon, this is a puzzling mystery, but we know who killed the man – a murdering albino monk doing God’s work for the Opus Dei religious sect – and only slowly, when the dead man’s granddaughter, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), shows up on the scene and clues begin to connect, does Langdon begin to suspect, after being fingered for the murder, that it’s all some kind of huge religious conspiracy concerning the Holy Grail, a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, and, quite literally, the entire history of the Christian faith. Of course he doesn’t realize all of this in one scene, it takes nearly an hour and a half of expositions and plot devices to land Robert and Sophie at the villa of Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen, giving the best performance in the movie), who spells it all out with a snazzy computer slideshow of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”, which suggests that the disciple to Jesus’ right was not John, but Mary Magdalene, and, if I get this all right, that Jesus and Mary were married, she had his baby shortly after his death, and the bloodline, protected by the Priory, is still alive, and MacGuffin of Langdon’s complicated quest. Wrapping it up, apparently Da Vinci was a member of the Priory, hiding clues to the secret within his works, and it took hundreds of years, an albino monk, a secret “Cryptex” (another Da Vinci creation that holds the key to the mystery, if only somebody knew how to open it), a cute French cryptologist, a Harvard scholar sporting an awkward haircut, a crippled Grail expert, and a whole bunch of shady Opus Dei leaders to finally figure it out. About 90 percent of this plot summary is probably accurate, but I’ll take a quote from Ian McKellen to live with the other 10 percent; “the mind sees what it chooses to see”, and my mind chose to see a film with a storyline so involving it’s nearly impossible to convey accurately in one measly paragraph. The book, and the film, created a big controversy over its suggestion that Jesus may not have been divine, yet a regular mortal, a married man who was taken from his pregnant wife and later used as the cornerstone of a faith that glorifies his death, and demonizes the thought of the Sacred Female (thus the slander of Magdalene), but I don’t buy into the controversy; it’s fiction, not scripture, and any blasphemous connotations are simply for plot purposes in a rather dense, foggy mystery. I can’t get over the fact that the film takes nearly two and a half hours to finally unspool the mystery, with dialogue so instructional and expository it’s almost insulting to the intelligence of the audience, but I can appreciate the way in which Ron Howard directs the story amongst the many famous locations, and the digital wizardry he employs in highlighting the complicated clues (ala “A Beautiful Mind”), and the washed out creepiness of the flashbacks used to better explain the history of the Priory of Sion and their massacre at the hands of the church and Opus Dei. “The Da Vinci Code” is a nice looking film, and the talented cast does what it can with very little emotion to be had from such a textbook religious mystery, but it’s an exhausting trek, and though there’s nothing wrong with a summer blockbuster that makes you think, one that leaves you with a headache is possibly too packed with info for its own good. “The Da Vinci Code” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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