Friday, May 19, 2006
A Review - Da Vinci Code the movie
Well, I went today to the 11:20 showing. My thoughts??? Well, I think Sony is going to be sorely disappointed in their financial return.
First off, I taught a class on The Da Vinci Code in the Winter of 2005, and that forced me to read the book. The book was, well, not well written, based on something even less than suppostion, and its characters incredibly unlikeable. I had to be honest, I could not figure out for the life of me why 40 million copies of this book had sold.
But given its commerical success, you knew there would be a movie version. What did I expect? Well, given the reviews out of Cannes, not much.
And...I was not disappointed. Its not that its a bad film...its that it feels a little like a Lifetime Channel movie of the week. Its not suspensful, its not engaging, its not deep. Its just, there. Flat. And long. Has all the pace of a 1990s NY Nick’s game. My gosh, very few movies should go for 2.5 hours. Some do it with out a problem (Lord of the Rings being the best example). Not this film. They cut out a good deal from the movie, and it still felt like it dragged on. So the pace of the movie distracts from all that is good in the movie.
What is good? Well, sad to say, not Tom Hanks. Now, I am one of the eight people in the U.S. who cannot stand Hanks. Its his mouth. Though You’ve Got Mail is one of my more favourite romantic comedies. But in this movie he looks like he just got out of the hospital for appendicitis. He’s bloated, hagard, and bored. Heck, there were times I thought he looked better in Saving Private Ryan than he did in this movie. His performance was okay, but he really did seem like, “Geez, I am not sure doing this film was such a good idea.”
The only decent casting was the actor who played Captain Fosche and Ian McKellen. Ian gets slammed in my next post for being an absolute idiot. But he captures the spirit of meniacal Grail junkie. He even got the few laughs.
The settings were, well, lets just say that only the scenes at Rosslynn Chapel were good. You could tell that both Westminster Abbey and The Louvre did not want the internals of their buildings used, so the setings felt foreign.
Of course, the whole issue is, how did they handle “the controversy”? The answer, they handled it in a way even worse than in the book. Yes, they have Tom Hanks playing the role of skeptic in his first meeting with Lee Teebing (McKellen), but after a few skepticals comments, he goes silent. In the end, what we get is Hanks essentially buying into the whole Brown Thesis that Jesus was married, had a baby, and that the Church had covered this up for years through violence and power.
They did do a good job of letting Opus Dei off the hook, making the bishop and albino murderer members of a sect within in Opus Dei. That was nice. No reason to accus actual organizations of crimes.
But the thesis regarding Mary? Several problems: First, the historical “evidence” is not cleaned up in the least, despite the numerous of scholars, including non-Christians, who have pointed out Brown’s errors. They did clean up the anti-Jewish elements (aka, Yahweh and Shakinah being “lovers"). Actually, the whole “Sacred Feminine” thesis seems to have pretty much vanished in the movie version, which means that the deeper underside of Brown’s thesis disappears too much. In the end without the Sacred Feminine plotline, why do we give a rip about Mary Magdalane at all - because she was the daughter of Jewish Roylaty? Good monotheistic Jews certainly would not be praying to her. As a matter of fact, if Jesus isn’t far more than a prophet, one has to ask, who gives a rip about Mary Magdalane??? Okay, I can see the Church wanting to silent those who said she was Jesus’ wife, but why would she have “followers” who dedicated themselves to preserving her legend and legacy.
Brown and Ron Howard (as director) also fail to explain why, if the Church is so “anti-woman” they develop the whole cult of Mary in the centuries following Constantine’s eleveation to Emporer. If you have the whole Mary Magdalane thing in your back pocket, you would use that as much if not more so that Jesus’ mother. Again, no explanation, just the Church was evil and anti-woman.
By the way, if Tom Hank’s character is such a good historian, he would know that the Gospel of Mary Magdalane was not written by MM, unless she lived to be about 200. If she did, then make that case, but don’t even try and tell us that the Gospel of Mary Magdalane was written by Mary when no competant scholar I know of dates it any earlier than late 2nd or early 3rd century.
By the way, the Church, both East and West, has lifted up Mary Magdalane in its liturgy and saints catalog. And this is leaving out the fact that the Four Gospels of the New Testament include positive stories of Mary, including her being one of the witnesses of the Resurrection - which makes her in fact, in her going out to tell the disciples, an apostle.
But, as I said, the worst part of Hank’s portrayl is even worse than the book. In the movie Hanks is this weird sort of postmodern, it doesn’t matter what is real but what you believe kind of person. This is acually more damaging to faith than Brown’s literary attack on the veractiy of the Gospel message. As Tom Wright, the bishop of Durham says, “If you can show me the bones of Christ, I will take off my robes and find another line of work.” The whole Brown thesis never touches the central message of why we even consider Christ to be divine - his resurrection. In the end, Hanks leaves us thinking, “well, facts do not really matter, what matters is faith.” That is indeed gnosticism, which was the real reasons that books like The Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas did not make it into the Bible.
Gnosticism treats the physical as unimportant and the spiritual/faith side as the truly valid. That is the most disturbing part of Brown’s thesis - its just too internally inconsistent. He uses gnostic sources, that treat women and the physical in general as useless, as the basis for his whole thesis. Urrrggh. Either be faithful to gnosticism or don’t.
But Hanks does say one thing that is important for Christians to remember. Jesus was divine, but he was also fully human. If Jesus had married (and there is no evidence that he was, except from silence), that in no way changes his being fully God and fully man. It would be in line with humanity’s call to be connected to each other, especially in the biblical injunction that the man and the woman need each other and should be united into a form of oneness in marriage. The only issue with Jesus’ having a child is that it would raise issues regarding a) whether she was truly human, b) whether she would be worshipped and c) the whole issue of whether or not there should be a line of ascension through blood or through faithfulness (this is one of the issues still breaking apart Islam).
So, in the end, should you go see the movie? As a movie, its at best a C+ (probably more of a solid C). So, don’t go see it if you want to see a good movie. There are other and better movies to see. Should you go see as an “apologetic” for the Christian faith? That is your decision, but to be honest, maybe you should just read a good book and take your friends to see another thought provoking movie like Thank You for Smoking.
