Rotten Tomatoes keeps score – it’s at 0% now, with 5 reviews in.
I have one more post on this I will try to pull together this afternoon, and then…aside from anything startling or interesting, I hoping that will be my last word.
McKellen, a pro’s pro, lends suavity and power to the Leigh Teabing role (a character Brown named for two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail). Yet when he delivers the film’s dead-serious climactic line — “You’re the last living descendant of Jesus Christ” — it got a derisory laugh from the Cannes crowd.
Just what you’d expect, some would say, from a smug bunch of infidels. Well, despite my cataloguing of the movie’s faults, I’m not among the smirkers. In that blizzard of what’s-in-the-movie publicity, there was speculation that the filmmakers might shy from the Opus Dei subplot, or at least from naming the group. One wag suggested that, given the character played by the child actor Ronny Howard on The Andy Griffith Show, he might re-dub it Opie Dei. But no, he charged ahead, calling it by name and depicting the society in exactly as harsh a light as the book does. Expect protests.
The movie goes further. Beneath the chases and crashes, the chalices and cilices, it denies Jesus’ divinity. As Teabing (perhaps not the most trustworthy authority) says in the movie, “The Greatest Story Ever Told is a lie!” And further still: the film challenges the belligerence that too often adheres to religious believers, the wars and atrocities perpetrated in His name. “Who is God, who is man?” asks Sophie. “How many have been murdered over this question?” I’m not taking sides on that issue. But for a mainstream, $125 million summer movie to raise it, let alone suggest a negative answer, in a cultural environment already politicized and polarized by religious debate, takes big steel balls. I didn’t know Opie had ’em.
So maybe there’s one more Da Vinci Code movie mystery yet to be unraveled. Will the mass movie audience take to a thriller that appears to attack the fundamental beliefs of what, our leaders keep telling us, is an actively Christian country? If Howard’s movie marches through that storm, it will become a phenomenon as impressive as the book’s gigantic sales: the first secular-humanist hit.
But how can it be secular humanist if it’s all about the sacred feminine?
Update: I called it!!!!
From a May 12 entry on this blog:
I also have a prediction, based on what I sort of know about the screenplay and the clips I’ve seen: the Langdon character is going to function as the witty skeptic in all of this – he is going to be far less on board with the "theories" in this film than the character in the book. He even has a moment near the end in which, based on an experience he had as a child, in which he muses that "Well, Jesus could be God, huh?" and then of course, we’re back to "Who knows? No one knows! Pick a story! Any story!"
Entertainment Weekly’s review:
A crucial change from the book is that Langdon has been made into a skeptic, a fellow who doesn’t necessarily buy that official Christianity is a lie. This is a sop to the film’s critics (i.e., the Catholic Church), but it feels cautious, anti-dramatic. Yes, a soupçon of research reveals that the Priory of Sion is a hoax invented in 1956, and surely it can’t be proved that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were ever intimate (though Martin Luther believed so). But what we want from a film of The Da Vinci Code is the fervor of belief. It’s there only in Ian McKellen’s playful, crusty turn as Leigh Teabing, the scholar who hobbles around on twin canes, spouting happy rhetoric about the meaning of the Grail. As a novel, The Da Vinci Code has a resonance that lingers. It may be less history than hokum, but it’s a searching product of the feminist era, when even many true believers have grown weary of the church as an instrument of moral reprimand and male dominion. The film is faithful enough, but it’s hard to imagine it making many converts.
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