The Da Vinci Code: A Controversial Film of Mystery and Faith
Tom Hanks plays the main character, Robert Langdon, with a reserved, intellectual air that only opens up toward the end of the movie. Audrey Tautou, as Sophie, bears a good combination of beauty, chic, and vulnerability. Ian McKellen, as is his tendency, steals every scene he’s in. Paul Bettany his wondrously creepy as the mad monk assassin, Silus. Jean Reno is Captain Fache, as dogged a policeman that France has ever produced, at least since Javert from Les Miserables.
The Da Vinci Code is a combination murder mystery, intellectual scavenger hunt, and quest story. The scenario that Dan Brown presents us in the Da Vinci Code, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalane, that the Church suppressed this fact, and that Da Vinci revealed the truth through codes in his paintings, is familiar to everyone. It’s a plausible seeming scenario, at first glance, and makes the Da Vinci Code an enjoyable film if one leaves it at that. Director Ron Howard gives us a fascinating, intellectual thriller with wonderful scenery in France and then England as a backdrop.
Of course, on closer examination, the scenario of the Da Vinci Code falls apart. Many of the details of architecture and art do not actually correspond to reality. Opus Dei is a Catholic lay organization that does good works and, while known for its conservatism, certainly does not employ insane, albino monks to kill people for the One True Faith. The Priory of Sion, far from being a thousand year old secret society that has had many of the great men of history as members as depicted in the Da Vinci Code, is in fact a fraud perpetrated in the 1950s by a small group of very disturbed people.
One could conclude from conjecture that Jesus married and had children. Jewish men of his era were expected to do this as a matter of course. For Jesus not to marry and sire children would have been considered at best strange, at worse suspicious. There is nothing in any of the Gospels that would argue against him having been married. The four Biblical Gospels are silent about the life of Jesus between the ages of twelve and about thirty.
This has not stopped the Catholic Church and other religious institutions and leaders from getting all up in arms about the Da Vinci Code. Catholic Priests have forbidden their congregations from seeing the Da Vinci Code. Reverend Jerry Falwell recently thundered on television about Jesus being depicted as “committing sinful acts” (how married sex is a sin even in Falwell’s church is a question left unanswered and perhaps better unasked.) Boycotts have been called for. Copies of the Da Vinci Code book have been burned.
The fury of the religious class has been nothing compared to the unkindness of the critics. Many film critics have panned the Da Vinci Code as being overlong and boring.
All of this activity has proven to be self defeating. The Da Vinci Code made about 214 million dollars the first weekend, according to Box Office Mojo. Hollywood, whose main principle is the greenback, is already moving heaven and earth to make the Da Vinci Code prequel, Angels and Demons, in which Robert Langdon does battle with the Illuminati. Tom Hanks is sure to be an even richer man before all of this is over.
The Da Vinci Code has even made some of its shrewder critics rich. An entire industry of Da Vinci Code rebuttals has been created with books and documentaries that have picked apart the scenario presented in the book and the movie. The Da Vinci Code has started endless conversations and arguments about the nature of Jesus and of religious faith.
And perhaps that is as it should be. Religious Christians, rather than rejecting the Da Vinci Code, perhaps should embrace it instead. Any work that provokes all this discussion of religion in this secular age ought to be considered all to the good.
As for the central premise? What matter is Jesus were found to have been married. It’s not a bad thing to get married and start of family. Most religions promote that sort of thing. And, as Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon (a more religious man in the movie than the book) asks, would such a revelation destroy faith or strengthen it?
