Quantcast
Click here to read more...
March 27, 2008
Newsletter:     
Search:        
 
Click Here to Order!
 
Return to Home Page Return to Old Archive Home Page Doctrine, Scripture, Morality, Vocation, Community Identity, Sexuality, Family, Healing, Work Art, Ideas, Technology, Science, Business Politics, Bioethics, Ecology, Justice, Peace Spirituality, Prayers, Poems, and Witness Archive of top news from around the web Columns, Reviews and Personal Essays What is Godspy?
faith article
spacer
spacer
<OPINION>
RELATED LINKS
A Heart of Stone Breaks: Oliver Stone’s 'World Trade Center', by John Murphy
The most shocking thing about 'World Trade Center' is how little it resembles a typical Oliver Stone movie. With this film, Stone has discovered his inner idealist. Unfortunately, in the process, he managed to misplace his inner artist.

Apocalypto: Mel’s Mayan Book of Revelation, by John Murphy
With his ferocious new ultraviolent action movie set during the waning days of the Mayan empire, Mel Gibson delivers the uncompromising vision of an art-house indie filmmaker.

Blessed Are The Spin Doctors - Opus Dei and The Da Vinci Code, by Austen Ivereigh
How Opus Dei took on The Da Vinci Code's hype machine - and won.

Da Vinci Code Diary, by Austen Ivereigh
Two Weeks in the Life of Britain's Da Vinci Code Response Group.

How It Happend: United 93, by John Murphy
Director Paul Greengrass’s powerful new film, United 93, respects what the terrorists did not: the dignity of every human aboard that plane, including, ironically, the terrorists themselves.

Love Against Fear: A Review of 'A Mighty Heart'
In ‘A Mighty Heart,’ there’s no missing Angelina Jolie’s pillowy lips and striking bone structure. Yet distraction soon yields to admiration for her focused performance in this compelling new film about the kidnapping of American journalist Daniel Pearl.

Miraculous Conception: A Review of Children of Men, by John Murphy
In Alfonso Cuarón’s brooding and brilliant new film, the promise of new life sparks a light in a lifeless world.

My Lunch with an Old Friend of Dan Brown Proves Revealing About The DaVinci Code, by John Zmirak
Is Dan Brown a convinced heretic hell-bent on bringing down Christianity, or a hack writer who stumbled on a crackpot conspiracy theory on par with alien abductions, Holocaust denial, and lizard men?

Paradise Lost: The Films of Terrence Malick, by John Murphy
Terrence Malick has made just four movies in three decades, but each one is marked by a singular religious vision—man fallen from grace, disconnected from nature, divided against himself.

Return of the Kong: A Review of King Kong, by John Murphy
Peter Jackson's 'King Kong' is a marvel—a massive, special-effects extravaganza that dares to ask: Is it better to die for Love and Beauty, or live alone and unloved as King of the Jungle?       

Suicide Boy: John Updike's 'Terrorist'
John Updike’s stories have been about spiritual longing in the face of a faith-impoverished society. So what does it mean that the most faithful character in his new novel ends up a terrorist?

ADVERTISEMENTS
Click here to buy the movie...
 
 
 
 
 
 
Click here to see the video!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Click here to buy!
 
 
 
Click Here to Order!
 
 
 
Click here to buy!
 
 
 
 
 
 

How Dull the Con of Ron: The DaVinci Code

Ron Howard, known for his cloyingly self-important Oscar-bait films, was the wrong man to direct the movie adaptation of The DaVinci Code.

Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou


I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code. Since about a trillion people have, I suppose I should feel out of the loop. Having just seen the movie, though, I think I’ll stick with Umberto Eco. Enduring Ron Howard’s dull and ponderous adaptation gave me the feeling I’m not missing anything. And though I don’t doubt Howard’s spiritual karma took a hit when he attached his name to this soulless project, he should reserve his most sincere mea culpa for committing the worst cinematic sin of all: boring his audience.

The DaVinci Code might have been campy fun, instead of a laborious bore.
It’s not that the movie is bad. It might have been more entertaining if it was. Instead, DVC has that depressing kind of competency which signals lack of conviction married to bald-faced greed. The sets are big and expensive, but nothing interesting happens in them. The actors are top-notch, but the script doesn’t supply them with human beings to play. Casting Alfred Molina as a dour, menacing bishop, or Jean Reno as the proverbial dogged police inspector, is like hiring Placido Domingo to sing “Every Breath You Take” at your wedding. Why? Actors of Molina and Reno’s caliber could play these cardboard characters in their sleep, and there is something oddly comatose about their performances.

And what about Tom Hanks, the beloved American Everyman? Hanks’ prominent brow (crowned by a mop of lank, greasy hair), stoically refuses to unfurrow throughout the film, and generally does his acting for him. All the part requires is for Hanks to stand around looking confused-slash-constipated, and occasionally rearrange letters or solar systems in his head. That sort of thing might work in a book, but Robert Langdon struck me as a curiously listless movie hero. He hardly does anything. Howard even manages to dim the glow of Audrey Tatou, so adorable in the 2002 French film, Amelie, but who here has the pallid grimace of a migraine-sufferer.

And who could blame her? The plot gives me a headache just thinking about it. The gist is this (for the other three people in the world who have not read the book): Harvard symbologist, Robert Langdon (Hanks), and French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu (Tatou), are on the trail of the Holy Grail. On their trail is an albino monk, Silas, member of Opus Dei. The movie doesn’t make it clear if he’s bad because he’s a monk, an Opus Dei monk, an albino, a self-flagellator, or just because he kills nuns. Probably all of the above. Our intrepid Grail-seeking heroes have to crack a whole bunch of codes and riddles along the way, while Langdon gets stuck with the unenviable task of declaiming mind-numbingly ridiculous exposition. “Is it possible?” Sophie asks after one of the movie’s myriad mock-revelations. “Well,” answers Langdon, “It’s not impossible.”

As the story lurched from one clumsy plot-point to the next—always followed by perfunctory chase sequences—I kept hoping the latest “twist” would mercifully prove the last, so I could go home and do something comparatively fun, like the dishes. Only the great Ian Mckellen, paying the rent with his delicious performance as Sir Leigh Teabing, Grail scholar, gives the movie a much-needed jolt. His enthusiastic scenery chewing provides the film with its few moments of twinkle-in-the-eye fun. Had the rest of the cast and crew taken Mckellen’s cue, DVC might have been campy fun, instead of a laborious bore.

The movie insults my intelligence more than my faith. 
DVC’s ho-hum story and paper-thin characters would have little interest outside the spectacular controversy the book invited by attacking the heart of Christian faith. Is the movie anti-Catholic? To which I ask: is the Pope Catholic? The Catholic Church is to DVC what the Nazis were to the Indiana Jones series. According to this film, Church officials have nothing better to do than shoot pool in plush (though shadowy) libraries, speak in hushed tones about secrets kept for thousands of years, and arrange the murders of anyone who gets in their way. At least most of their conversations are in Latin, which lends their dialogue a gravity that the lines spoken in English certainly do not have.

DVC is more than anti-Catholic, though. Any movie with a plot that hinges on Christ having married Mary Magdalene and spawned a line of dissolute French monarchs (oh, and was also definitely not God) safely falls within the parameters of a more general kind of anti-Christianity. However, DVC is also anti-plausibility, anti-character development, anti-subtlety, and anti-fun. So I’m all for anything this movie is against. Frankly, I’m more offended by the ways in which the film insults my intelligence than I am by the ways in which it insults my faith.

One of the goofiest stories ever told cannot debunk The Greatest Story Ever Told. 
Anyone would learn in an introductory art history class that “Da Vinci” is not Leonardo’s last name. It means, literally, “from Vinci.” Shouldn’t someone in this movie know that? And there are no monks in Opus Dei, a lay Catholic movement. But it’s just a movie, so who cares, right? Okay, so given that, how does a wheezing old curator, with a bullet in his stomach, muster the energy to drag himself around the Louvre writing anagrammatic phrases like, “How dark the con of man,” next to paintings, disrobe, inscribe a circle on the floor, draw symbols on himself, write a cryptic message next to the circle (which includes a scrambled Fibonacci sequence), and then arrange his dying, bleeding carcass on the floor after the manner of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man? I don’t know about you, but I’d feel a little silly exhaling my dying breath that way.

If the movie is anything like the book (and I’ve heard it’s a faithful adaptation), then I am truly worried about the state of literacy in the world. What happened to the days when Dickens was hugely popular? Or Shakespeare could pack’em in at the Globe? I enjoy a good beach read, like anybody. But there is suspend-your-disbelief fun and then there is brain-frying stupidity. There are moments in this movie that border on self-parody. It’s certainly convenient, for example, that pigeons are so willing to help our hapless heroes by dive-bombing a gun-wielding Bad Guy. Or that Silas can break two bullies’ necks in a bat of an eye, but gets bested by an old man with not one, but two canes. And this is to say nothing of all the historical mumbo-jumbo. If anyone you know has had their faith shaken by the experience of reading or watching The Da Vinci Code, then I suggest you recommend a religion more appropriate to their gullibility level: Scientology, perhaps. Simply put, one of the goofiest stories ever told cannot debunk The Greatest Story Ever Told. 
 
The Catholic Church is to DVC what the Nazis were to the Indiana Jones series.
In response to my objections, someone might advise me to lighten up. It’s just a movie. Well, yeah, you’re absolutely right. The problem is that a movie this silly should lighten up. There’s a difference between Indiana Jones taking his search for the Ark of the Covenant seriously, and Steven Spielberg taking it seriously. Howard seems to think he’s making one of his cloyingly self-important Oscar-bait films. DVC has virtually no sense-of-humor, at least apart from the laughs it generates unintentionally. I mentally checked out of the movie when Langdon intones, with a straight face, “I have to get to a library. Fast.” That would have been an amusing action sequence: Langdon furiously flipping pages while the furrow in his brow deepens.

So what was all the fuss about? Yes, it does piss me off that DVC reduces Christianity to the same conspiracy-theory twaddle as “Did aliens build the pyramids?” I would be much more offended, however, if the movie had been good. One of the film’s last-minute attempts to appease Christians comes when Langdon, after saying that Christ was not the Son of God, thoughtfully adds, “But maybe human is divine.” The Da Vinci Code’s decidedly earthbound mediocrity blows holes in that theory.    

spacer
May 22, 2006

JOHN MURPHY writes from Oregon on film, literature, and art.

© Copyright 2006, GodSpy. All rights reserved.

Email A Friend
READER COMMENTS
08.09.06   ava123 says:
I m happy to see that the movie was so screwed up, that pretty much anyone who read the book completely forgot about it as soon as they saw the movie. Thanx to Ron.

05.22.06   Godspy says:
Ron Howard, known for his cloyingly self-important Oscar-bait films, was the wrong man to direct the movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code.

Click to buy at Amazon.com!
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Advertise | About Us