I've Seen The Da Vinci Code Movie

I just got back from seeing The Da Vinci Code movie. I have been teaching an adult Sunday School class on it at church for the past three weeks. I had some time today, so I went to see it. I want to share my intial reactions to it. I am not sure why, as so many others who are smarter, more articulate, and more perceptive have written mountains on this book ad movie. My favorite is Mark D. Roberts, pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church. The guy, as they say, is "wicked smart."

My initial impression was that I liked the movie, aside from all the Christian bashing that goes on. It was better than I expected, but that may say more about my expectations than about the movie!

I thought it was a wee bit on the longish side of things, but not excessive. One New York Times wag wrote that it took him longer to see the movie than it did to read the book! Must have been an Evelyn Wood graduate.

I like puzzles, and I liked the puzzles and the mystery in the book. But I thought that many of the puzzles were resolved much too quickly. (And I complain of a long movie!) What I mean is, in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", Indy solves riddles and puzzles in minutes or hours, puzzles his dad spent a lifetime researching, and puzzles that have remain unsolved for centuries. The comparison, though, is that Indiana Jones movies are pretty campy, and not to be taken seriously. They are all played like Saturday morning cartoons, and not a little tongue in cheek. The Da Vinci Code is much more serious and earnest in approach, and it detracts from it, I think.

I was struck by several things. In spite of the severe lack of chemistry between Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, I came empathize with her character. In the story, her parents and her brother had been killed in a car crash when she was four, and she had been raised by her grandfather. At the end of the movie, she meets her grandmother, who, with tears in her eyes, welcomes her granddaughter home. Call it a sappy moment, but as one who has lost both parents in the last two years, I was moved by that. There is a sense that she now "belongs" to a family, in a way she had not before. Also, a very PoMo idea, her life now has significance.

I think Mark D. Roberts comments on Tom Hanks are right on. In the book, Hanks is a hard core pagan, devoutly espousing the "divine feminine." In the movie, he appears to be a lapsed Catholic, and is a foil to Teabing's (McKellen's) ranting about conspiracy theories and church corruption. Perhaps Hanks and Ron Howard (along with Dan Brown) wanted to soften Langdon's character be be more sympathetic.

I was not at all pleased with the anti-Christian rant by Leigh Teabing in the middle, "the centerpiece" of the movie. The continued enthusiastic spouting of historically inaccurate details about the church was appalling in its naivete. And yet, these comments about the fraud that is Christianity were themselves historically suspect, and had no basis in actual history. I expected it, as it is mostly in the book. But I was surprised at how virulent it sounded on the screen, with howlers like, "The church has done more harm than any other group in the history of the world."

Right. Like Stalin, murdering 30 million of his own people in the Gulag, and sending another 20 million soldiers to die fighting in WWII with tactics that were old when Attila the Hun was a lad? Or like Hitler's Germany murdering six million Jews? Yup, those darn Christians built schools, teaching people to read and write. Christians build hospitals to help the sick. Christians almost single-handedly ended the slave trade. Christians helped enact child labor laws in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

Has the church been perfect? Not at all! Has the church lived up to its identity or calling? Partially, but not perfectly. Has the church been the single largest source of evil in the sordid history of human beings? The accusation is laughable, but there was Ian McKellen, making those charges. With great passion!

I was also a bit concerned with the penultimate ending, at the English chapel. After discovering her true identity, Sophie and Langdon converse outside the chapel. She wonders at the weight she must now bear, that she knows that she is a descendant of Jesus Christ, and that if the world ever found out, it would be disastrous. Besides, since the body of Mary Magdelene has disappeared, there is no real test or proof of Sophie's true identity. At this, Langdon replies something to the effect of, "Well, the reality is what you believe it to be." In other words, reality is not defined externally, but internally. If you believe you are a direct descendant of Jesus, you are! If you do not believe you are, you are not. As if we individuals are the final arbiters of truth in our own lives. How PoMo!

Now that I have read the book and seen the movie, I can talk intelligently with others, and there seem to be a great many others, who have seen the movie. I'd be interested in what you thought of the movie.