The Da Vinci Code

The whole world and the heavens above it—or maybe it’s just Hollywood and the sulfur pits below—wait with bated breath to see how Dan Brown’s daffy theological scavenger hunt will do at the box office. Will Howard’s cinematic translation satisfy or alienate the book’s millions of devoted fans? Not being members of the latter congregation, we can’t answer with certainty, but our best guess is that if the book floated your boat, then the movie will too.

At two and a half hours, the film can hardly be called succinct, but screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) has trimmed a fair amount of flab from the plot (e.g., there’s no small cryptex nestled inside the big cryptex here) while preserving all the key set pieces.

None of the actors finds room for his or her A game, but a cast this strong can’t help but contribute some humanity to Brown’s characters, who are little more than names on a page. Hanks draws heavily on his everyman mojo to animate the role of Robert Langdon, professor of the nonexistent discipline of symbology; Tautou (Amelie) is persuasively cute, pert and French as police cryptologist Sophie Neveu.

Many of the book’s long, clotted passages of expository dialogue remain, but at least they’re enlivened by bleached-out historical flashbacks of pagans being worshipful of nature, knights being chivalrous, witches being drowned and so forth.

From our perspective, half the fun of the film was keeping track of the punches it pulled in the service of moderating the Code’s historical claims and blunting its offensiveness to Catholics and Christians in general. In the book, for example, Langdon and his mentor Sir Leigh Teabing (McKellen) are both true believers in the historical conspiracy theory that drives the plot. In the movie, however, Langdon is positioned as a relative skeptic who counters or qualifies Teabing’s assertions as “just theories” instead of backing them up. Still later in the film, it’s Langdon who puts in a good word for conventional Christianity by urging Neveu to keep an open mind about the divinity of Jesus, to whom Langdon has personally and profitably prayed.

The film also makes a halfhearted effort at tempering the book’s demonization of the Roman Catholic Church by attributing the blame for all Grail-related evil deeds not to the Vatican per se but to an evil conspiratorial body called the Council of Shadows operating from inside the Vatican, see? The caveat doesn’t count for much amid the film’s relentless exploitation of Catholic imagery for its spook value, but it’s nice to know that you don’t have to be a Jesuit to make Jesuitical distinctions.—Cliff Doerksen