Impossible to take seriously

Rating: 5/10 (23 September 2011)

Which of the following statements are true?
 Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian, Scotland, was built by the Knights Templar
 The name "Rosslyn" is a corruption of the phrase "Rose Line"
 "Rose Line" is another term for a meridian or line of longitude
 Rosslyn Chapel lies on the same meridian as Paris
 The organisation known as Opus Dei is an order of monks
 The organisation known as the Priory of Sion is the modern successor to the Knights Templar.
 Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton were both members of this organisation
 Alexander Pope presided over Newton's funeral
 Leonardo's famous painting of the Last Supper shows Mary Magdalene sitting on Christ's right
 Christ and Mary Magdalene were married and had a daughter, Sarah, from whom the French Royal Family are descended.
The answer is that all these statements are demonstrably false, apart from the last which, while unsupported by any evidence, cannot be definitively disproved. Rosslyn Chapel was built in 1456, more than a century after the suppression of the Templars. "Ross" (headland) and "lyn" (waterfall) are both common elements in Celtic place-names. Nobody except Dan Brown ever refers to a meridian as a "rose line". Rosslyn Chapel lies more than five degrees to the west of the Paris meridian. Opus Dei is not a monastic order but a Catholic organisation of lay people and secular priests. The Priory of Sion has no connection to the Templars and was not founded until 1956, so Leonardo and Newton could not possibly have been members. Pope, as a Catholic layman, could not have officiated at an Anglican funeral service. The figure sitting to Christ's right in "The Last Supper" is St John the Evangelist, traditionally shown in Christian art as a fair-haired beardless youth.
"The Da Vinci Code", however, is a film which assumes that all the above statements, especially the last one, are true. In form, it is a Hitchcock-style thriller, based around a man and woman accused of a crime they did not commit. An elderly Frenchman named Jacques Saunière is found murdered in the Louvre. We learn that the real culprit is an "Opus Dei monk" named Silas, but (for reasons too complex to set out here) suspicion falls upon a visiting Harvard University academic named Robert Langdon and the dead man's granddaughter Sophie Neveu. Langdon and Sophie go on the run across France, England and Scotland, following various clues in search of the information which will establish their innocence. They are well equipped to decipher complex clues as he is a "symbologist" (one who makes a study of symbols and symbolism) and she is by profession a police cryptographer.
The McGuffin which they are seeking is the Holy Grail. In the Arthurian legends and films such as "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" this is depicted as a cup or chalice, but Dan Brown inclines to the theory that the Old French for "Holy Grail", "San Greal", is really a corruption of "Sang Real", or "Royal Blood". The Holy Grail is therefore the royal bloodline deriving from Christ's supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene. According to the film, the Catholic Church has throughout history sought to destroy all evidence of this marriage, believing that such a revelation would destroy Christianity, while the Knights Templar and their successors the Priory of Sion have sought to preserve this forbidden knowledge. It turns out that Sauniere was killed because he was a member of the Priory and that Langdon and Sophie are in danger not only from the police but also from fanatical elements within the Church.
There are some good things about the film- there is, for example, an entertaining performance from Ian McKellen as the historian Sir Leigh Teabing- but overall, I found it dull. Ron Howard has made some decent films in a number of genres, but thrillers like this are not really his forte, and I found the action too slow-moving and the plot over-complex. This is not one of Tom Hanks's better films, and, as in "Dirty Pretty Things", Audrey Tautou shows that she is not as accomplished an actress in English as she is in her native language.
I had, however, two other, more important, reasons for disliking the film. The first is that a conspiracy thriller has to have some connection with reality if the alleged conspiracy is to remain plausible, and "The Da Vinci Code" is so riddled with factual errors that I found it impossible to take seriously anything it has to say. (I listed a few, but by no means all, of these errors at the beginning of this review). The second is that Dan Brown seems not to realise that his main thesis could, if true, actually have led to a more reactionary form of Christianity, not to the more liberal one which he claims would have been the result. If the Kings of France (and other European countries) had indeed been direct descendents of Christ and Mary Magdalene they would most assuredly not have kept this fact a secret. They and their servants in the Church would loudly have proclaimed their holy bloodline- and their consequent superiority to ordinary mortals- to the world.
I am not a Catholic, and unlike many of those Catholics and other Christians who denounced the film as "blasphemous" I am personally sympathetic towards those interpretations of Christianity which place more stress on Christ's humanity than on His supposed divinity. I doubt, however, if many of us- regardless of our religious views- would want to live in a society ruled by quasi-divine monarchs claiming direct descent from God himself. 5/10