A Review of The DaVinci Code Movie

It was just a movie.

After reading the book, seeing countless books get published debunking the book, watching the Biography and History Channel, and A&E all formally change their names to The DaVinci Code Channel, and listening to everyone get their feathers all ruffled-up and bent out of shape, it turns out The DaVinci Code is just another movie. No more, no less. And in the end, The DaVinci Code’s grail quest turned out to be a more intellectual, but less entertaining movie, than Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Since it’s a Monday and I am in a great mood, lets start out with the good:

- Ian McKellan (Sir Lee Teabing in the movie) is officially being entered into the Voiceover Hall of Fame, joining charter members Anthony Hopkins and Morgan Freeman. This guy could say anything and it’d sound regal … “You’re about ready to witness the greatest colonoscopy the world has ever seen.” I love listening to him talk and explain things, which probably saved the movie since McKellan’s character rambles on like a drunk chick at a bar who just broke up with her boyfriend, for half the film.

(SPOILER ALERT: One of the best scenes of the movie is the look on Tom Hanks’ face as McKellan kept talking and talking and talking and talking while getting arrested and dragged into a police car - and yet still wouldn’t shut up! The expression Tom gives us during that scene is the reason he has won two Academy Awards)

- The movie is under three hours long and Ron Howard did a great job pacing the film. The movie never drags and he doesn’t waste a lot of screen time on unnecessary subplots or plot points. On behalf of my ass and bladder, I thank you Mr. Howard.

- For all the calls to protest and boycott the movie (by the way, it grossed over $200 million worldwide last week), The DaVinci Code doesn’t make a whole lot of “factual” claims outside of the ones necessary to tell the fictional story. Robert Langdon (Hanks’ character) was consistently skeptical of the historical theories tossed around by the other characters and the movie doesn’t approach the “factual” rhetoric used by Dan Brown in recent interviews. Not surprisingly, the book tries to present itself much more as historically accurate than the movie does. But when you evaluate the entire movie, it’s easy to see that Opus Dei is not portrayed as an out-of-control, evil organization (at best you could say they had two bad apples who were manipulated), the claims about Jesus and Mary do not, or rather should not, destroy Christianity or cause a crisis of faith, and that the assertions about Christianity (while they may be historically inaccurate) are told in a way that make the movie entertaining and worth seeing.

That being said, let’s not throw The DaVinci Code in with The Godfather, Casablanca and American Beauty quite yet …

Here were the problems:

- Tom Hanks was not a good choice to portray Robert Langdon. Hanks became an iconic movie star by playing the “everyday” sort of guy, not the intellect. If you look at Tom’s most successful roles: Forrest Gump (playing as simple as a character as there is), Big (playing a child in an adult body) and Saving Private Ryan (a high school grammar teacher), he thrives with characters who are not all that different from the average movie audience. Even in movies where he plays smarter characters: Catch Me If You Can, Cast Away, Apollo 13, you never got the sense Hanks was a brilliant thinker. That isn’t a knock on Tom Hanks, he’s obviously intelligent, but his relate-ability to the audience is what makes him great. In The DaVinci Code, Robert Langdon is an Ivy League professor, a genius of symbols, and you never totally buy in to Hanks being that guy, mostly because he seems too much like you and me - and most of us aren’t going to be lecturing in Cambridge anytime soon. As my friend Ryan remarked as we were leaving the theatre, “You never forgot you were watching Tom Hanks.” Hanks didn’t kill the movie by any means, even though there were some scenes and lines where his acting seemed fake and forced (very un-Hanks-like), but an actor like Josh Lucas (A Beautiful Mind, Glory Road, Sweet Home Alabama and Poseidon) would have been a much better choice.

- There was more chemistry between Ron Burgundy and Baxter in Anchorman, than there was between Hanks and Audrey Tautou (Sophie). This isn’t Sleepless in Seattle, so I didn’t want them to fall in love on the Empire State Building, but a good rapport there was not. I never got the sense either of them were enjoying the greatest journey in the history of mankind. If it wasn’t for a few lines here and there uttered by the long-winded Teabing, none of the characters seemed to appreciate what they were discovering. It is amazing to me how un-suspenseful finding the most important artifact EVER, could be. I mean, you are dealing with Jesus, DaVinci, the Vatican, Popes, Emperors, hidden codes, famous museums, knights, priceless works of art – freakin' act like it! On top of all of that, Sophie saw her grandpa’s murdered body, helped an accused murderer flee the country, learned secrets about her family and her true lineage, yet she doesn’t seem all that phased by those events. I think if someone had said, “Robert and Sophie, Jesus himself is waiting for you by the Mona Lisa,” they would have intensely stared at each other for a couple of seconds and then matter-of-factly walked to the end of the hallway like Jesus visits France everyday. At least in Indiana Jones, you got the feeling Harrison Ford and Sean Connery sensed how momentous their discoveries were.


But Sophie kinda looked like the third wife, Margene, from Big Love, so that was fun.

For me, there are two things that you have to do well for a movie to be considered phenomenonal: character development/arc and story. Most of the time it’s easier for a movie to succeed with a weaker story and strong characters, than the other way around. That’s why goofball comedies like Zoolander and Old School, and cheesy action films like Face/Off and Armageddon, are entertaining, and movies with great stories like Munich and The Passion of the Christ, disappoint. Unfortunately, The DaVinci Code is closer to Passion, than Zoolander. Robert Langdon was strictly a vessel to tell the story through. We knew no more about him at the end if the film then we did at the beginning (except for he had a terrifying incident with a well when he was a boy). We knew a little bit more about Sophie, but she certainly didn’t arc. Teabing’s big secret was surprisingly unemotional, mostly because we didn’t know much about him and he didn’t arc either. I can’t help but think that given how charged the story was, had The DaVinci Code nailed the characters, the film would have tremendous.

One final thought about all the controversy …

My friend Nicole, who is a devout Christian, saw the movie this weekend (she didn’t read the book), emailed me today and wrote, “What's all the fuss about exactly?” She’s right. The DaVinci Code movie certainly wasn’t all that radical of a film. In JFK, it’s suggested that Lyndon Johnson was instrumental in having Kennedy assassinated. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, regardless of what kind of person you are, drinking out of the Holy Grail will give you eternal life (not exactly a Biblically-based theory). Movies have taken shots at the Catholic Church for years (in The Godfather, Part III, the Pope gets whacked by corrupt Catholic clergy) and movies regularly take far-fetched theories, unpopular opinions and selective historical evidence, and convincingly tell a story. That’s what movies do.

The bottom line is, regardless of what Dan Brown has said in interviews, or what was written in the book, there is nothing overtly offensive to Jesus or Christianity in the movie. You may disagree with its conclusions or its interpretation of history, but it is just a movie.