In what I heard about the movie – information that I have never really parsed in detail publicly because I was unsure of the relationship of what I heard to any final shooting script or cut, but that sounded and read authentically – the final scene in DVC was radically different from the book’s ending. Now it can be revealed! I think.

The novel ends with Langdon back in the Louvre, pondering the presence of the REAL HOLY GRAIL, and hearing the voices of women come to him through the ages. Even people who liked the novel told me they hated the ending, and it was a letdown, for sure.

Possible spoilers after the jump. Because there’s one big gap in the information I got – related to stuff that’s not mentioned, but I know, from press reports, was filmed.  So. Take it with a sack ‘o salt.

Update: Supersize that bag’o salt. From an Australian critic:

Critics duly queued for more than an hour to get into a film that, as everyone grumbled, was obviously too long at 148 minutes. Cannes critics are a notoriously severe audience with little time for anything past the 100-minute mark. Even so, the sprinkling of titters that added sparkle to the second half of the film was more openly derisory than usual.

The crunch moment came, however, when Tom Hanks, as the earnest professor of symbology Robert Langdon, uttered an especially melodramatic line. At that point, 900 weary critics laughed as one. After a couple of hours of leap-frogging plot there had to be some moment of relief.

When, finally, the camera swept back to Hanks, gazing through the glass roof of the Louvre’s foyer to where he had deduced – how is uncertain, but never mind – that Mary Magdalene’s sarcophagus now lay, there was the deathly sound of no one clapping. A few people whistled – a sign of derision in Europe – but, in truth, The Da Vinci Code was not actually bad enough for anyone to enjoy tearing strips off it. Like Hanks, whose face seemed to be pursed in perplexity throughout the film, it just took itself way too seriously. If the novel was popcorn, Howard’s film was a badly overcooked goose.

I heard that the film ends this way: Langdon and Sophie in a cafe, discussing everything. Langdon (in another change from the novel) recounts an experience he had as a child in which he almost drowned, but prayed to Jesus and was rescued. He muses, well, perhaps Jesus was divine after all. You can practically hear HERE CHRISTIANS, HERE’S YOUR CRUMB being shouted from the edges of the set.

Then Sophie, who has been established as a bit of a klutz throughout the film, rises to leave. As she does so, she knocks over the glass of water she had been drinking. She’s gone. A waiter appears and offers to refill Langdon’s glass of wine. He says, oh, we weren’t drinking wine…it was water. They look down TO SEE WINE DRIPPING OFF THE TABLECLOTH.

Bah-bum.

In a way, the ending is much more satisfying cinematically than Langdon listening to voices, and is kind of weirdly clever way of wrapping things up. But it’s still lame. And I wondered if it would please the "sacred feminine" crowd, who are all about a broader point, not the specifics of Sophie.

Except for the big old logical hole of…er…Jesus was "just mortal." But Mary Magdalene was divine. And their child was. Or something.

So…how come in the Da Vinci Code, everyone’s allowed to be divine ‘cept Jesus? Just wondering.

An excerpt from the Hollywood Reporter review hints that perhaps what I heard was accurate:

Screen adapter Akiva Goldsman has definitely punched up Brown’s third act. He has actually improved on the novel — at least for those who buy in to the historical controversy that Jesus left behind a royal French bloodline — by giving the story a broader, more fulfilling payoff than the novel. If one doesn’t buy into that controversy, then the story becomes just that much more forced and corrupt. (The final revelation produced a few titters in the first press audience to see the film.)

Via Jeffrey Overstreet: He’s quoting someone, but the original site seems to be down:

Ron Howard knows how to ratchet up the tension in a movie; witness Apollo 13 and Backdraft. But here, instead of the film building to a white knuckle conclusion, it was the audience fidgeting as Da Vinci passed the two-hour mark and unveiled the first of its half-dozen endings. So much so that by the time the big climactic moment of the film finally arrived, the audience burst out laughing, as if this were yet another classic bit of Tom Hanks comedy. As the credits rolled, not a single bit of applause was heard.