When a Movie Contains a “Flashback” to the Council of Nicea . . .
. . . you know you’re in for some silliness. Such is the case with the recent movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code.
Yes, Porpoise and I are back from Hawaii, and I plan to recount some of our adventures on The Ottery. But first I have to blog about Da Vinci, because I’ve been holding it in for almost a week now. Plus, we’re going to see X-Men 3 (yay! another movie featuring Ian McKellen acting silly!) tomorrow, and I can’t juggle two movie blog entries in my head simultaneously.
So, yes, we saw The Da Vinci Code in Hawaii, which normally I would have considered a waste of valuable hiking time. However, we had been badly roasted by the sun the previous day, and nothing sounded better than sitting in a cool, dark place for a couple of hours and laughing our heads off. Which is what we did.
Anyway, back to the Council of Nicea. I don’t know whose idea it was to attempt to render Leigh Teabing’s monologue about suppression of the “sacred feminine” less boring by interspersing it with historical flashbacks, but whoever thought of it has about as much storytelling sense as Dan Brown, which is to say, about as much storytelling sense as the dead muskrat perched atop Tom Hanks’ head.
The “Council of Nicea” scene features a room evenly divided down the middle, with white-bearded men in togas yelling and gesticulating threateningly at each other. You almost expect one of them to leap across the room and start beating a representative from the other side, à la Brooks’ caning of Sumner in the U.S. Senate. Either that, or you hope that it’ll somehow turn out to be a Monty Python-esque sketch, complete with singing and dancing.
Alas, The Da Vinci Code ‘tis a silly place, but it doesn’t know it. If Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman weren’t so darn earnest, they could have taken the unintentional camp of the novel and run with it. Instead, they stick reverently to the high-blown cheesiness of the original.
Take another moment from the Teabing monologue (which, in the book, is a Dan Brown monologue divided between Teabing and Langdon—more on that change later), when he recites the “proof” that Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ had a romantic relationship. The book quotes the Gospel of Philip thus: “Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth.” In the movie, Teabing quotes thus: “Christ loved her more than all the other disciples and used to kiss her often on her—,” at which point Sophie breaks in with another question. Now, the movie version is actually more accurate, as Goldsman must know: in the manuscript of the Gospel of Philip, the object of the preposition is illegible, which creates some pretty funny possibilities. If you know that, it makes you laugh at the line’s movie treatment. But if you don’t know that, it makes no sense.
There’s actually one aspect in which the novel is even superior to the movie—which really does not speak well for the movie. Brown, in spite of his horrific prose, does keep you hooked with cheap tricks and mysterious escapes that aren’t explained until the next chapter. It’s manipulative and lazy on the author’s part, but it works. The movie couldn’t even provide that kind of cheap thrill—the action sequences simply come off as flat.
That said, I am intrigued with some of the changes the movie made to the character of Robert Langdon, the Harvard “symbologist.” I spent most of the novel wanting to kick him, because he’s this suave know-it-all who is quite obviously Dan Brown’s image of himself. Tom Hanks’ Langdon is more unsure (perhaps because of his hairdo) and more humble. And, poor thing, he had a traumatic childhood experience that left him claustrophobic. When Teabing declares something to be fact, Hanks’ Langdon inserts, “It’s merely a theory”—a change perhaps intended to pacify the book’s critics, but one that also seems in tune with Langdon’s character as presented in the movie. Langdon’s doubts about Teabing’s assertions turn the film into something of a conversion narrative for Langdon. Though Teabing, as interpreted by Ian McKellen, is mad, Langdon and Sophie gradually come to accept the theory as truth.
Or do they? By the end of the movie, as Langdon and Sophie are discussing the impossibility of proving that she is descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, Langdon makes a statement something along the lines of “Faith is whatever you choose to believe.” Though it’s a pretty insipid message, I was fascinated with how the movie’s ending made room for mystery and doubt as part of faith. In contrast, Dan Brown presents his account of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as gospel truth, his gospel truth. The one true story, which has only one interpretation. In short, Dan Brown is a fundamentalist. He just happens to preach different fundamentals from the Christian fundamentalists he decries.
Yet what the film gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. It gives us a portrait of faith as mysterious, but then, at the end, when Langdon kneels at what the clues suggest might be the tomb of Mary Magdalene, instead of leaving us with his unproved and yet newly held belief, the camera takes us down and shows us what he can’t see, that Mary’s sarcophagus really is down there. Blah. So inconsistent with what the film was, at times, trying halfheartedly to make its theme.
Again, in Langdon’s and Sophie’s conversation about faith, Langdon asks, referring to Jesus’ nature, “Why does it have to be human or divine?” Um, well, it doesn’t, which is kind of the point of Christianity. The paradox of Jesus being human and divine is the central paradox of the Christian faith, one that, if accepted, has to be accepted as a mystery that we will never fully understand in this life. But the film can’t leave it there. Instead, Langdon has to tidy things up, to tie up loose ends in a nice little aphorism, by saying “Maybe human is divine.” Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you go. No more worries to boggle your mind.
Both the novel and the movie of The Da Vinci Code, I would argue, underestimate their readers/viewers and condescend to them. However, I’m glad for both, because they’ve opened up room for some intelligent discussion (and some stupid discussion, too, of course) about faith and religious history—and art, too, I suppose. People, if given access to information, are smarter than Brown and Howard and Co. give them credit for. They can handle facts, and they can handle mystery. And they can also have fun with both, which is more than I can say for the pomposity of The Da Vinci Code.
7 comments May 26th, 2006