I have not yet seen the move, The Da Vinci Code, and am in no rush to do so. I have, however read the book. What follows are noteworthy movie reviews from people whose opinion on other matters I value highly.
Peggy Noonan writes:
I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents. Why would Tom Hanks lend his prestige to such a film? Why would Ron Howard? They're both already rich and relevant. A desire to seem fresh and in the middle of a big national conversation? But they don't seem young, they seem immature and destructive. And ungracious. They've been given so much by their country and era, such rich rewards and adulation throughout their long careers. This was no way to say thanks. . . .
"The DaVinci Code" could still triumph at the box office, but it has lost its cachet, and the air of expectation that surrounded it. Its creators have not been rewarded but embarrassed. Good. They should be.
Michael Novak (author of many books)
Confession: I have not read the book. Its first few pages of bad writing and howling history filled me with too much disgust.
The one thing that really shocked me was the movie's underlying intention, stated several times with great clarity: the depth and passion of its anti-Christian, anti-monotheism craziness. To say the movie wishes actually to be the anti-Christ would only sound extravagant; still that is the constant and underlying message. The "heroes" of the film have to save the world from the oppression and injustice brought into it, not only by Christianity, but by all monotheistic religions. Wherever there is monotheism, the secular hero says, there is violence, or oppression, or something like that.
All that matters, Tom Hanks tells the only living descendant of Christ, is what you believe. Not truth, not reality, but whatever you believe. That's what matters. You make up reality as you go. The professor Hanks plays makes plain that he believes that Jesus is only a man—a man and that's all. A great moral teacher, perhaps, but only a man.
That, of course, is the one thing that the Jesus himself does not allow us to believe. If Jesus is only a man, he is no great moral teacher. He is on the contrary a fraud, a pretender, a horrible spendthrift with his own life and the lives of his apostles—all twelve of whom met a martyrdom like his, some of them crucified, all of them most brutally killed without the utterance of a single recantation. If He was not the Son of God, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he was either a mountebank or a lunatic, and deserves our contempt, not our praise. His every moral teaching would be vitiated by its radical emptiness and fraudulence. . .
Some, of course, may be so crazed themselves that they will truly enjoy the Catholic bashing—all these scheming, hideous, bloodthirsty, maddened cults and their captives, all those mysterious blessings and signs of the cross on the way to murder most vile. Is this what the author and filmmakers actually think moves the more than 1.2 billion Catholics on earth today? Are these artists so blinded by hatred that they cannot see, in the very paintings and glorious churches aspiring toward the sky in whose midst they do their filming, a reaching upwards toward "the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars"?
I think I have never for two-and-a-half hours felt so surrounded by decadence and hostility toward Christ.
Thomas Hibbs (author of many books)
For a book that propounds a subversion of patriarchy by the eternal feminine, The Da Vinci Code embodies a blandly traditional gender relationship between the elder, experienced male (Langdon) and the youthful, naïve female (Sophie). One of Langdon’s great paternal moments of pedagogy comes as he listens calmly to Sophie’s distraught confession that she had a “rift” with her grandfather after she inadvertently discovered his participation in a strange sexual ritual. Langdon patiently asks Sophie whether the ceremony took place around the time of the equinox, with androgynous masks. When she responds affirmatively, he explains that she witnessed an ancient ceremony called “Hieros Gamos” or sacred marriage, which celebrates the “reproductive power of the female.” What appears to be a “sex ritual” has in fact nothing to do with eroticism. “It was a spiritual act,” a means of achieving “gnosis—knowledge of the divine.”
The term “gnosis” calls to mind, as Brown’s book does explicitly in many other ways, the ancient religious cult of Gnosticism, which sought a complete transcendence of the body and an ascension to a realm of pure spirit. The most advanced members of the sect were thought to have already transcended the realm of the body. That’s the supposition behind Langdon’s assertion that the sexual ritual was void of eroticism.
But this is where Brown’s use of Gnosticism itself becomes incoherent. The great emphasis in the book’s final chapters is not on transcending the body to achieve pure spirit, but on the “power of the blood coursing through the veins of Sophie Neveu,” whose parents are both from “Merovingian families—direct descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ.” The Priory of Sion guards the secret in order to protect the “surviving royal bloodline.” (It is interesting to note that the Priory of Sion is not ancient, as Brown’s book says it is, but is rather a mid-20th century invention intended to advance unseemly political interests in France.)
There is double trouble here for Brown’s heroes. First, how do we get from the Gnostic repudiation of the body in favor of the spirit to the assertion that what is most significant is pure biology, a bloodline? Second, why should anyone today care about the protection of a royal bloodline? On the one hand, Brown wants to demote Christ, who is no longer to be conceived of as divine, but merely as an influential human; on the other hand, Brown wants to elevate Christ’s human bloodline, his royal genealogy. But unless we harbor nostalgia for hereditary monarchy, why should we be moved by this or deem it worthy of protection? Is there not something deeply troubling about Brown’s enthusiastic embrace of the purity of blood?
Frederica Mathewes-Green (author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism and many other books, who tells the story of her own encounter with Christ here)
The first hour, though very busy (and bloody), is so packed with verbal exposition and so lacking in character dynamics that it plods laboriously. It feels like a droning afternoon class, where you have to pay attention because this is going to be on the test. . .
The movie’s premise, that the Church degraded St. Mary Magdalene and concealed her tomb, is such a whopper that it deprives the plot of traction; only the completely ignorant can maintain such extreme suspension of disbelief. St. Mary Magdalene was so beloved and admired that both Ephesus and Provence claim she spent her final years evangelizing among them, and her relics—far from hidden—were enshrined and venerated in both locations. She’s honored as a great saint, named patroness of churches and convents, pictured in icons, and celebrated with liturgical hymns. How ignorant of history would you have to be not to know this? . . .
Even within the logic of the story, it’s not logical. The evil bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina, who oozes presence—this contrasts with Hanks, who oozes absence) says that when he finds the evidence he will destroy it; Sauniere, responsible for protecting the evidence, seals it in a device that, if mishandled, will destroy it. He ends up spending his dying moments writing riddles for Sophie that are kind of hard, but not very; they don’t insure that she alone could decipher them, or even that she’ll be able to decipher them at all. Both Aringarosa and Silas (Paul Bettany) are complex figures in the book, with some touching attributes; here they’re just plain evil. (And the movie Silas is not an albino, he’s a blond—a surfer without a tan.) Sophie hisses at Silas, “Your God doesn’t forgive murderers. He burns them!” (Nope, the most basic Christian teaching is that God freely and completely forgives all who repent. But it’s kind of creepy to discover that theological revisionists are this eager for a wrathful, punishing God.) The film’s violence is absurdly gratuitous: when a flight controller is slow in giving Captain Fache information, he breaks his nose, knocks him down, and then starts kicking him. Was Howard afraid the audience might be getting bored?
So skip buying a ticket, and wait to rent this movie some night when you’re in the perfect mood to get a lecture from a conspiracy-minded blowhard. In the meantime, you can mull this over. The Da Vinci theory has everybody talking about where St. Mary Magdalene’s bones are. How come nobody asks where Jesus Christ’s bones are?
