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Yes, you've heard it all already: Dan Brown's best-selling The Da Vinci Code is an international obsession, with sixty million copies in print and a steady slot on the bestseller list for 162 weeks. Devoted pilgrims have traced its route through France, England and Scotland; religious groups all over the world are fervidly protesting its claims; dozens of Web sites and books attempt to prove or debunk it; and if you haven't actually read it yourself, someone close to you has and won't shut up about it. And now, with the movie poised for general release, the furor and devotion have intensified so much that, in the unlikely event that I were to choose a good day for the Bush Administration to declare war on Iran, it might be the day millions of distracted fans pile inside movie theaters to see Ron Howard's adaptation of the book. Okay, so maybe I'm paranoid, but it's certainly in the spirit of the story. The plot hinges on a huge Catholic cover-up of Jesus's true nature (he wasn't divine, was married, and had a kid) and the Grail (it's Mary Magdalene, Jesus's wife and bearer of his bloodline). Had it not been for the sinister efforts of the emperor Constantine to suppress the truth about Christianity, we'd all be worshipping Mary Magdalene's bones, engaging in erotic rituals based on ancient sex rites called heiros gamos and — though the movie leaves out some of these choice parts — we'd also know that familiar features of church architecture are meant to evoke a woman's labia, clitoris, and womb. A group called the Priory of Sion protects these secrets, along with the living offspring of Mary and Jesus. When the Priory's Grand Master and Curator of the Louvre, Jacques Saunier (Jean-Pierre Marielle), is shot dead at the story's outset, Harvard cryptologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and French symbologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) are summoned on a Grail hunt involving a villainous albino Opus Dei monk, Silas (Paul Bettany), a jovial-turned-sinister scholar of the Grail, Lea Teabing (Ian McKellen), and, I guess to appeal to the high-culture fans of the smashingly successful Les Miz, a Javier knock-off police chief, Bezu Fache (Jean Reno). Without rehashing all the plot points that you already know, fans will be thrilled to hear that the movie is pretty much true to the book: it's bad. The cringeworthy screenplay matches Brown's cringeworthy prose. (Take, for instance, the skeptical Langdon's response to Teabing's claim that Mary is the Grail: "This is an old wives' tale." Teabing: "The original one, in fact." There were nothing but groans in the preview audience I was part of). Also true to the book is its superlative take on historical events — you know, where "never in human history has there ever been such a man at such a moment with such a charge that could affect
It's also fitting that Brown's utterly flat characters should be played, with the possible exception of Silas and Teabing, by such flat actors as Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou. Even when Tautou manages a semi-convincing attempt to arouse Hanks, he remains flaccid throughout — which, seeing as how it's Tom Hanks, may be just as well. If I may digress for a moment here, what in God's name was Ron Howard thinking by casting Tom Hanks as a sexy, tweedy college professor? No one I know has ever considered Hanks sexy — no, not even in Splash. George Clooney, yes. Russell Crowe, yes. Hugh Jackman, God, yes. Of all these other actors considered for this part, who on earth would choose, as one critic put it, "Don Knotts in a greasy mullet"? At least the offended Opus Dei and National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation can take heart, since their character — Silas the Opus Dei albino monk — was hands down the sexiest character in the film, and the only one who seemed to have any chemistry going with either Sophie or the women in the audience. But perhaps even the women who no doubt will account for the bulk of ticket sales will agree to suspend disbelief even here, as elsewhere, because there's just something irresistible about a conspiracy theory. Plus, aren't conspiracies appealing partly because there's usually a hint of truth in them? While the evidence and the conclusions are way off-base in Brown's hands, it is true that the church has suppressed probably dozens of worthwhile documents and gospels, very often for dubious political reasons, and that it fails colossally when it comes to anything involving more liberated views of sex or women. So it's great to see people putting some chinks in the church's armor. But, getting back to my earlier point, why stop here? After all, suppression of truth, abusive and shadowy authority figures, erroneous facts . . . hmmm, sound familiar? It should. Now if only we'd stop burying our noses in this story of lies and deceit and turn our gaze toward the one in the Oval Office, as well. But I guess, as Prof. Teabing puts it in another of his pathetic attempts at profundity, "We see what we want to see." Alas, and amen. n°
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