The Da Vinci Code: A Controversial Film of Mystery and Faith

The Da Vinci Code begins with the murder of the curator of the Louvre Gallery in Paris, France. The body is found naked, with strange symbols written on it in blood and cryptic messages and numbers written nearby, also in blood. Thus begins the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s controversial potboiler.

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.