Paging Dante: A New Circle of Hell, Please, for Cinematic Sin

Rating: 1/10 (26 May 2006)

Did Ron Howard direct this movie with the aid of a seeing-eye dog? "The Da Vinci Code" is set in stunning locales in France, England, and Scotland. It may as well have been set in a closet. How could a director spend so much time in Gothic cathedrals and make them appear visually dull? Stained glass windows, flying buttresses, vaulted ceilings - did Howard even register these? Howard doesn't just drop the ball with Christian art. The Nike of Samothrace, perhaps the single most thrilling sculpture ever to emerge under the hands of an artist, serves as backdrop for one scene. Howard does absolutely nothing with it.
The bad reviews for Ron Howard's "The Da Vinci Code" are not the result of a Vatican conspiracy. "The Da Vinci Code" presents its audience with a timeless, diabolical mystery. How do you take one of the most riveting, page turning novels of all time, jam packed with controversial propositions, and turn it into a bore? As a Catholic, I was prepared to be offended; as a scholar, I was prepared to scoff at cheap, pop, historical revisionism. Instead, I am outraged that this movie paralyzed me with boredom.
Reviews criticized the film as talky. I don't have a problem with talky films; I do have a problem with ineptitude. For all the guns and plots and threats on screen, the movie lacks a single moment of real thrill.
I kept thinking of Stanley Donen's 1963 Cary Grant - Audrey Hepburn film "Charade." Like "The Da Vinci Code," "Charade" is set in Paris, it involves a mystery hiding in plane sight that people kill over, and a suave man and a beautiful woman thrown together in a perilous effort to solve the mystery, before they are killed. "Charade" makes you feel as if you are actually in Paris. It wrings that setting as if it were a dishcloth. The chemistry between Grant and Hepburn snaps, crackles, and pops. "The Da Vinci Code" doesn't present a single moment with "Charade's" magic.
"The Da Vinci Code" also never manages to convey the deadly menace the protagonists face. Its hairbreadth escapes and creaky plot points strain credulity. There is a scene where a woman confronts the masochist, albino, monk assassin - you know the type - who has murdered her grandfather. The scene is meant to be heavy; it is just plain silly.
So much for "The Da Vinci Code" as a movie. How about as a sociological artifact? This much is clear: the movie hates Catholics. Catholics, here, are masochistic self flagellators, spooky, world manipulating conspirators, and are, as said in so many words, responsible for all human strife everywhere and throughout time. One has to ask, Why was such a weirdly bigoted movie made? Why devote so much time and energy to calumniating Catholicism? Could a similar mainstream American movie be made stating just as baldly that a conspiracy of Jews are responsible for all strife, or a conspiracy of Muslims? The answer, clearly, is no.
One thing that is not going on is what the movie claims it is all about. "The Da Vinci Code" presents itself as a defense of women who have been under assault by the Catholic Church. Virtually all of the main and minor characters of "The Da Vinci Code," though, are, as is standard in Hollywood blockbusters, male. Again, as is standard, there is one female, she is young, she is attractive, she is tiny, she wears a short skirt and high heels while running away from bad guys who menace her, into the arms of good guys who rescue her. If this is Dan Brown's or Ron Howard's idea of how to rescue Catholic women, I'm ready to become a nun.
"The Da Vinci Code" tells some very big lies about church history. Read Rodney Stark and Anne Jensen on women in the early Christian church, read Lyndal Roper on the truth of the witch hunts, read Cynthia Eller on the pure nonsense that this film sells about women's status in pre-Christian Paganism. There will be a quiz. Don't worry. Taking the quiz will be more fun than watching "The Da Vinci Code."