Consider the way Howard and cinematographer Salvatore Totino bask in the oppressive shadows entombing the frame whenever Paul Bettany’s murderous Brother Silas appears on screen. This made for an addictive beach read, but in Howard and Sony Pictures’ pricey movie adaptation, the pretenses were heightened to operatic levels. It’s an international escapade where the MacGuffin is the most interesting element.
In an era with a growing interest in conspiracy theories, this one was the mother lode.īrown took these fringe theological ideas and gave them an erudite sheen in The Da Vinci Code while still essentially writing a piece of fluff. that essentially decided which early Christian texts would comprise the New Testament and which would not-and continued through Leonardo da Vinci secretly placing Mary Magdalene in his “The Last Supper” mural by putting her at the right hand of Christ. This formula turned Brown’s first Robert Langdon novel, Angels & Demons, into a literary hit, but what made The Da Vinci Code an international phenomenon-and thereby grabbed Hollywood’s attention-was the kernel of a brilliantly explosive idea: What if the MacGuffin in the next story wasn’t some abstract relic from antiquity but something that would challenge our very idea of Christianity today? What if the story of the “Grail Quest” turned out to be evidence that Jesus Christ was married? And what if Christ had children by that marriage?Īnd, finally, what if the evil “Illuminati” baddies here were an offshoot of the Catholic Church wanting to cover it all up?īrown derived this twist from the research of Lynnn Picknett and Clive Prince in The Templar Revelation, a highly speculative text which posits the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene has been downplayed for millennia by the Catholic Church, beginning with the Council of Nicaea-the ecumenical Roman council in 325 C.E. It’s all no more challenging to the viewer (or their storyteller) than the background details provided by M in James Bond flicks. Essentially Indiana Jones if Harrison Ford never took off the tweed jacket, Langdon is an expert in the real world field of art history and the fictional one of symbology, and his monologues give the proceedings a nice bit of pseudo-intellectual window-dressing. It’s about secret societies, dastardly supervillains, and a matinee idol for the academia set named Robert Langdon. Written on the page by Brown like any other airplane-ready page-turner, with nearly each short chapter ending to the implicit musical sting of “dun-dun-DUN!,” the book is a pleasantly conceived time-filler. To be sure, The Da Vinci Code is still a ludicrous story that both benefited from and was weighed down by the sensationalism of its conceit. And judging by the infamous catcalls the movie received at Cannes, which were followed by a tepid critical drubbing in the international press, I wasn’t alone in thinking the movie amounted to a lot of overinflated hoopla.īut a funny thing happened when I sat down to watch it on Netflix the other day, about 15 years after its release: I realized what a big goofy delight the movie could be with the right mindset, and what I as a teenager-and so much of the contemporary film press during its time-missed out on. One that features Tom Hanks earnestly looking into the camera to declare “I need to get to a library!” as the music swells. And all of that cacophonous noise was over… a pretty middle-of-the-road adventure movie.
Protests occurred at theaters throughout the U.S., while other international markets banned it outright.
How could something that high-handed live up to that kind of hype?Īs a splashy Hollywood version of Dan Brown’s most popular potboiler, The Da Vinci Code premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was the subject of countless faux-examinations about early Christianity on the cable news circuit-as well as the object of ire for some modern Christians’ growing need for perpetual outrage. All the while, its rollout suggested it had aspirations to be an awards contender. It was an adaptation of the biggest literary phenomenon of the decade not starring Harry Potter, and it was arriving in cinemas with the kind of media frenzy usually reserved for Star Wars.
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When Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code took the world by storm in 2006, I was far from being a professional critic, but I could still be highly critical of something like this.
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