The Da Vinci Code

This film was entertaining but not good cinema. It did build suspense, in a haphazard way. If you see it without having read the novel, you will enjoy the surprises and turns of plot. If you see it having read the novel, you will enjoy watching events work themselves out.

Neither Tom Hanks nor Audrey Tatou has to do much acting. Both pretty much play their generic selves, and by doing so they make the film work as it does. There are a lot of close-ups and full-body shots. They run some and walk some, and there are a couple of car chases, but for the most part this is not an action film. Characters talk their ways through the action. The revelations that make up the deciphering of the code are mostly cerebral rather than physical. Characters do spend a lot of time driving or flying or walking to one location or another, but the travel is incidental, not crucial to the plot.

I can see the point of those who find the film anti-Catholic (it is really opposed only to certain splinter groups within the Church—at one point one of the characters explicitly states that the Vatican isn’t involved in the conspiracy the film is about). In general, however, the film treats the subject of religion with delicacy and respect. At moments it almost seems pious. It largely evades the issue of Christ’s divinity, suggesting instead that whatever he might have been he was at the least human. These are, I think, adjustments made in the adaptation of the novel, which was more aggressive in its attacks on the Church.

The film does play fast and loose with logic, Church history, and art history. It makes ingenious use of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but from an art historian’s viewpoint, Sir Leigh Teabing’s analysis of the painting is fairly preposterous. It mentions numerous historical figures such as Sir Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, and, of course, Da Vinci, but there is little evidence I am aware of that implicates them in the kind of plot the film describes. There was definitely a Nicean Council, as Teabing explains, and it was the point at which modern Christianity as we know it largely came into existence, but the film’s presentation of it is skewed. The film’s creation of the “historical” context of the Da Vinci conspiracy comes straight from the novel. The novel itself made canny use of history, freely altering, distorting, and re-interpreting it under the fairly safe protection of the fact that most readers and viewers would not know enough about the historical context to be able to dispute it.

Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabing is an acting highpoint in the film. Every scene he’s in vibrates with energy that’s largely absent elsewhere.

The film makes the important point that much of what modern Christians believe is based on legend, invented stories, conjecture, and “facts” received through two thousand years of obscuring time and history. As an institution based on verifiable fact, Christianity is on flimsy ground. This is where faith becomes necessary. And faith is, after all, what religion is all about, as the film makes clear.