Review: "The Da Vinci Code"

by Jeff McGinnis, Lead Usher

***1/2 stars (out of four)
148 minutes, Now Showing

One of the difficulties of reading a review of “The Da Vinci Code” is asking what aspect of the film the critic in question is reviewing. The movie brings so much baggage to the table before the opening credits even have rolled that it is difficult to discern at first what angle the reviewer might be taking in their comments. Did they read the book, and thus are analyzing it as an adaptation rather than on its own merits? Did they read the book and dislike it, and thus are negatively criticizing the story itself, outside of the work of the filmmakers? Is the reviewer of a religious bent, and thus criticizes the film for its attitude toward and theories about the church? Do they have a negative attitude toward the church, and thus praise the film based solely on those same attributes? Or do they simply review it as a movie?

I firmly believe that in this case complete disclosure is necessary for you, the reader, to properly receive and classify my opinions of the film, and decide if my views are necessarily valid for you as a moviegoer. I am a passionate agnostic, leaning toward atheist, who does not currently believe in God nor in Christ’s divinity. I am also one of the 40 million or so people who have read Dan Brown’s original novel, and I must confess, I found it fairly disappointing. It contains some interesting debate and discussion of some very hot button issues of faith, but as a story, its settings and events are contrived, its dialogue labored with the weight of the ideas it presents, and its climax, well, anti.

All of this, however, I tried to set aside as I began to view Ron Howard’s new movie based upon the novel, as I firmly believe that a film must, first and foremost, be evaluated as just that - a film. Beyond the baggage, how is it as a moviegoing experience? And I am glad I made that attempt, as the film version of “The Da Vinci Code” amounts to little short of a triumph. It takes what had seemed such a clunky and potentially unfilmable work as Brown’s potboiler, and through the efforts of Howard’s direction, Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay, and especially the acting of Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Ian McKellen, have transformed it into a tremendous thriller.

If you don’t know the plot of “The Da Vinci Code”…well, how exactly have you managed that? But, just in case, the story revolves around a Harvard professor named Robert Langdon (Hanks) visiting Paris to deliver a lecture on symbolism in history. His expertise in these matters (apparently) lead to him being called to the Louvre to examine the scene of the grisly murder of a museum curator, who, while mortally wounded, arranged a spectacular scene around himself involving bizarre symbols and hidden messages. One wonders how someone shot in the stomach knows exactly how much time they have left and intuit that they have just enough to arrange a complex series of clues for others to follow, but never mind - the whole device is just the springboard for everything else, and can be chalked up as an unavoidable contrivance of Brown’s original work.

Langdon is interrupted in his analysis of the scene by the arrival of Sophie Neveu (Tautou), who in a clever subterfuge is able to inform him that he is in danger, as the police captain named Fache (the indispensable Jean Reno) believes that Langdon committed the murder himself. Through a series of near-escapes and twists, Langdon and Neveu elude the police and begin to unravel the mystery that the curator (who was also Neveu’s grandfather) left behind.

It is really not fair to discuss the nature of the quest they are on for those unfamiliar with the story, but seeing as how pretty much every article, review, commentary and analysis of the book and/or film sees fit to bring it up (as do the film’s own trailers, pretty much), I feel blameless in proceeding. Still, spoilers ahead. The clues are arranged in a distinct order which leads Langdon to suspect that they are on the trail of the Holy Grail, which is not, as legend suggests, merely the Cup of Christ, but rather a symbol for Mary Magdalene, who was in fact Christ’s wife and the carrier of his bloodline. Langdon tells Sophie of this with the aid of an old friend, the delightfully named Sir Leigh Teabing, played with boundless enthusiasm by Ian McKellen, who is clearly loving every second of his role in this story.

The book’s theories and arguments about all of this and much more are dense and somewhat ridiculous to follow (but no more or less ludicrous than standard dogmatic theories, really), and are presented in long-winded diatribes the characters deliver to one another. The book, at regular intervals, pretty much stops its plot and begins lecturing. What Howard and Goldsman are able to do, however, is take that dialogue and condense it to its essence, taking full advantage of Goldsman’s talent for words and the nature of film as a visual medium, and successfully conveying the true nature and weight of the ideas the book presents, while contributing to, rather than distracting from, the story and characters. And in the hands of Hanks, Tautou and McKellen, scenes which played on the page as bland ciphers spouting ideas become red-blooded debates between complete characters.

The bad guys include not only the misguided Fache, but also fringe members of a Catholic sect named Opus Dei, such as the lumbering albino named Silas (creepily played by the usually handsome Paul Bettany) guided by a shadowy figure known only as “The Teacher.” Their goal is to find the Grail before Langdon and company can, seemingly so its shocking implications about the church will never be known. Members of the real-life Opus Dei have apparently cried foul about the seeming depiction of their membership here as self-mutilating fanatics, but the film makes a point of saying that these characters and their actions are very much on the fringe of the sect - the mainstream church is left rather surprisingly unscathed, the implications about the core of their doctrine notwithstanding. Indeed, the main body of the church is seemingly completely uninvolved with the events of the story, with a small group of cardinals (lead by the always entertaining Alfred Molina) manipulating things with no apparent input from the higher-ups. (An ill-advised shot of these folks playing a game of pool should probably have been removed in post.)

I am really rather pleasantly surprised at how well all of this works as a thriller. On the page, the events of the search seemed contrived and almost perfunctory - this is how we solve this puzzle, now, onto the next one. On film, however, the same events manage, with only a minor bit of cutting and re-writing, to take on a whole new level of intensity and excitement. The use of the actual locations (or, at the very least, thoroughly convincing sets emulating the actual locations) gives the story weight and incident, and the chase for the Grail generates genuine tension, despite the basic incidents being virtually identical to the novel. Even the novel’s anticlimax, faithfully represented, represents a true emotional climax here, thanks in no small part of the memorable score by Hans Zimmer.

The result of it all is a splendidly successful film, one which manages to hit all the right notes and find all the right solutions to problems that would have torpedoed lesser filmmakers. Ron Howard and company deserve amazing credit for turning Brown’s hefty-on-ideas-but-light-on-execution novel into a truly exciting, interesting and involving thriller. Other aspects of the film will be debated in the days to come (probably, and hopefully, on this very blog by some of our other commentators), but as a film, it works, and works very well.