The Da Vinci Code: A Dud?

My husband and I just saw The Da Vinci Code. We went to see an entertaining popcorn movie, not a great work of art. He liked The Da Vinci Code on those terms; I didn’t. I had read the book; he hadn’t. But he was able to easily summarize the main points of the plot and maybe that’s part of the problem.

I must confess that I have a problem with the whole Da Vinci code phenomenon. I found the book mildly entertaining, not the world shaking best seller it has turned out to be. I’m puzzled by all of this. Maybe it’s because we all love a conspiracy and one involving the Catholic Church is especially juicy. Some Christians may enjoy the scandal of having their beliefs challenged and non-Christians may enjoy the zings to Christianity.
The Da Vinci Code also makes us feel clever and smart.

I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that the main thesis of the Da Vinci Code, both the book and the movie, is that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and they had a child. Neither the book nor the movie offers very convincing proof of this but we can suspend disbelief. If we care about this, the movie will be more entertaining. I don’t care. My husband enjoys zings to Christianity, which may explain his greater enjoyment of the movie.

The Da Vinci Code the movie is easily understood by non-readers of The Da Vinci code the movie because it takes great pains to explain things. And it explains and explains and explains. We get pretty ordinary chase scenes followed by long stretches of exposition. Plod, plod, plod. Even the ending was an anticlimax that inspired the composer of the sound track to really pull out all the stops in an attempt to rescue the thing. I’ll bet most viewers became very aware of the sound track at the end, because the ending was so lame.

Even Tom Hanks can’t save The Da Vinci Code. And Audrey Tautau was downright awful, but then she didn’t have much to work with. The albino monk was good and the almost pornographic love the camera had for his scenes of self-flagellation was at least interesting.