First things first. The name of the eponymous artist from Dan Brown’s absurdly popular bestseller and now Ron Howard’s almost as absurdly popular movie adaptation is Leonardo.  L-e-o-n-a-r-d-o. Not “Da Vinci.” That is where he is from. He is Leonardo of Vinci. Not Leonardo Vinci, Jr. Not Vinci comma Leonardo.  Why was he called Leonardo da Vinci? To make sure he wasn’t mistaken for some other artist also named Leonardo. As in, Leonardo da Vinci painted the “Mona Lisa,” not Leonardo da Hoboken.  As luck would have it, however, the Leonardo from Vinci was the most talented Leonardo, and so when one refers to Renaissance art and “Leonardo,” it’s pretty clear about whom one is talking. Rather like that other first name-only Renaissance artist Michelangelo. Sadly, only one character in The Da Vinci Code seems to be aware of this, and it’s the bad guy a.k.a. “The Teacher” (wouldn’t you know). Not Paris resident and Louvre curator’s granddaughter Sophie Neveu, and not—even more egregiously—our hero, Harvard professor Robert Langdon. Then again, I’ve met Harvard B.A.s who are smarter and quicker than Langdon. Come to think of it, I’ve met undergrads from less high-falutin’ institutions who are quicker than Langdon.

I avoided Brown’s novel for a long time. Along with the turn-off factor of the title’s fundamental idiocy, there was also the fact that the subject matter wasn’t quite as compelling for me as it might be for others. I had no deep investment in the “heresies” or whatever of Brown’s yarn—which, when I did finally read it, left me to consider it purely on its storytelling. It’s utter trash and I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t so much the mystery over the Holy Grail and the “sang real” that kept me going. I figured it out long before the end. This didn’t diminish my involvement in the book so much as transform it. Reading became a game of “how far ahead of the Harvard professor can I get,” which is amusing in itself, though probably not what Brown wanted.  I suppose he intended to wrap some very dense, heady ideas in an accessible (read: dumbass) thriller format. Thus, 40 million copies are sold. And who better than to bring it to the screen than the hacktastic creative trio of director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer, and writer Akiva Goldsman?

Based on the reviews, apparently anyone would have been better.  Then again, The Da Vinci Code may be that rare “accessible” book that actually shouldn’t be adapted for the screen, or at least, shouldn’t have been adapted as a Hollywood blockbuster. One article on the adaptation of book into screenplay observed that Goldsman’s job was actually much harder than it may appear, because the book is essentially a long lecture on art and religious history punctuated by a few chase scenes, murders, and brandished guns. True, to a point.  The shoddy characterizations, inane coincidences, and (literally) unspeakable dialogue also may have had something to do with the difficulty as well. Unfortunately, the end product repeats all of these flaws, while highlighting one aspect of this story that is distinctly at odds with most iterations of summer blockbuster thrillers: a humanities professor isn’t exactly action thriller hero material, especially when the main action is cerebral. Yeah, yeah, Indiana Jones, I know. But I seem to recall that he usually shuts up about the finer points of archeological history once the Nazis et al. start chasing him. He has a whip, while Langdon as the rather less exciting weapon “eidetic memory.” You can jazz it up all you want with noisy flashbacks to the Crusades, highlighted letters, slide shows of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” and whirling dervish animations of Newton’s tomb, but you can’t escape the fact that this story requires a great deal more spoken exposition than it does visual action. And unless the onscreen speaker happens to be the sadly departed Spalding Gray, or Christopher Walken spouting Quentin Tarantino, such monologues tend to stop movies cold—though Ian McKellen does fight the good fight when it’s his turn to take the figurative podium.
 
There’s also another issue which gets deflected amid all of the discussion of the incendiary nature of returning Mary Magdalene to her “true” status as Jesus’s wife, and the attendant valorization of the feminine “chalice” as equal to the masculine “blade.”  That is, in the world of Hollywood blockbusters, the feminine is rarely equal to the masculine.  As a movie, The Da Vinci Code tells a story that is supposed to correct the centuries-long Christian-Western tradition of treating women as inferior to men, yet in order to make that palatable, it has to repeat the sin it so loudly decries. To be fair, I suppose, it should be observed that Brown’s novel commits the same sin. When it comes to a big movie sporting an all-star international cast, however, the paradox becomes unavoidable.  Hm, let’s see. Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina, Paul Bettany…oh, there she is. Audrey Tautou.  Not a very equal list, is it? Kudos to Howard for casting Tautou instead of making us suffer through Renée Zellweger or Nicole Kidman or Angelina Jolie or Julia Roberts slaughtering a French accent. But even if he had cast a major American female star, the highly unequal gender split would still be the same.  Sure, Sophie Neveu has a major part in the mystery (indeed, what should be the most major part), but she is the only notable female player (I didn’t catch the name of the murdered nun—then again, she may not have had one). And it’s left to McKellen’s rich old scholarly coot Sir Leigh Teabing to take umbrage at the received notion that Mary Magdalene was a whore.

As this might suggest, Sophie’s also a bit of a dope.  On the one hand, she shouldn’t be. She’s a police cryptographer, for Pete’s sake, not some uneducated yahoo from the French version of the sticks. She should recognize the Fibonacci sequence in a heartbeat, scrambled or unscrambled, and be able to decode her grandfather’s messages as fast as, if not faster than, Langdon. Her grandfather trained her with cryptexes, puzzles, and treasure hunts. She also knows how to get junkies away from picnic tables, how to create a diversion with a tracking device, and how to drive a Smart Car like a rally racer.  But on the other hand, she has to be a bit dim, and willfully ignorant about history, because if she really were as capable as she should be, she wouldn’t have as much need for Langdon. She also wouldn’t ask the questions that get Langdon’s and Teabing’s lectures going.  She has to be the empty intellectual vessel (ha ha) for Langdon to fill. She’s the chalice in more ways than one.

Which, I suppose, makes Langdon the blade, even though he seems more like a butter knife. I get why they cast Tom Hanks and not, say, Harrison Ford. If you’re going to make a movie that might piss off a lot of people, casting the iconic Mr. Nice Guy in the lead might smooth things over (adding Amélie and Gandalf to the mix also isn’t a bad idea). But he more often seems nonplussed than mentally engaged, even when he’s envisioning all of the possible words that could be spelled from “So Dark the Con of Man.” His “gee whiz” reaction to the Louvre doesn’t help, either (we’re supposed to believe that a scholar with his background in “religious symbology” and who knows the chateau where Teabing lives has never been to the Louvre? Come on). Then again, Goldsman and co. also didn’t do Hanks any favors by making Langdon more of a skeptic regarding the alterna-history of Christianity posed by the existence of the Priory of Sion and the true story of Mary Magdalene.  They take great pains to establish Langdon’s intellectual bona fides, including showing the cover of his book Images of the Sacred Feminine, and then make him act as if he’s never thought deeply or complexly about what those images of the sacred feminine might mean.  He can problem-solve, he can share fun facts about Fibonacci with Sophie, but he can’t quite connect the dots when it comes to the larger (really larger) picture of men, women, and Christianity.  I guess Hanks’s much discussed “scholar hair” is supposed to stand in for actual intellectual activity.

Nevertheless, Langdon always steps in at just the right time to save the day (and Sophie). She saved his American butt from police detective Bezu Fache, so he has to return the favor several times over. He bashes the nefarious Swiss bank manager. He survives a righteous throttling by mad albino monk Silas. He figures out a way to use the cryptex to get Teabing’s attention away from killing Sophie. He’s Professorman, able to solve knotty problems in a single leap, using his super-power eidetic memory!  And in case we didn’t grasp that Langdon is our hero, Teabing taunts Sophie about looking to her “hero” Robert to save her at Temple Church. Got it. Can I go home now? Can I stop having to witness these silly story contortions meant to convince me that Langdon is the Indiana Jones of the new millennium? Of course not.

Because even though Langdon saves Sophie and leads the way to her discovery that she is a glorious teacup descended from the Holy Grail herself—instead of just a pouty malcontent with a grandfather who was into really weird sex games involving people with masks—he still has one more act of heroism to perform. Sir Robert of Harvard has to find the Holy Grail. And he does. He and he alone cracks the final code and discovers the mother of all secrets (so to speak). Cue swooping camera moves and overblown music (apparently this is an important story moment). Yet, there’s something rather off about this conclusion. Shouldn’t Sophie be there? Shouldn’t she be a part of this discovery?  It seems like finding the Grail might now be something that actually matters to her, and she’s been there for every step of the quest. But no. No, no, no. She’s been safely tucked away in the environs of Roslin Church in England because such a precious object as Sophie must be protected.  Wait, I thought the whole point of the quest was to expose the truth about the Grail, Mary Magdalene, etc. etc. etc., and challenge the oppressively patriarchal nature of Christianity, and especially the Catholic Church. Oh, that’s right, that’s not Langdon’s quest: that’s Teabing’s and he’s the villain. Langdon just publishes books about the sacred feminine. And Langdon just wants to solve the puzzle. He doesn’t actually do anything about it. Some hero.

I hope he at least had the manners to call Sophie to tell her the good news.



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