Sublime imagery buoys up difficulties of The DaVinci Code

Rating: 8/10 (24 May 2006)

After all the blustering and whining commentary on what is termed "wooden" about Ron Howard's handsome take on Dan Brown's hugely popular novel evaporates, perhaps someone will notice the graceful and occasionally sublime imagery employed to buoy up a difficult topic. We are taken into Langdon's vivid imagination via CGI and beautifully compelled to embrace obscure concepts. Having read Brown's book and it's source, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", and a good deal on the Templars, and European history and art in general, I'm pretty delighted to be part of a culture that allows a writer or filmmaker to have this kind of adventure with what we consider to be the foundation belief system of Western Civilization. (And, anyway, who can complain about looking at Audrey Tautou, ever?) The real issue at question is not art, it's math: if Mary Magdalene's issue had procreated by even the minimal factor of two per generation, Christ's descendants would have outnumbered the current population of the planet by the year 825a.d.! Brown's payoff, that Sophie is Christ's sole living descendant, can only work if each successive offspring exercised extreme discipline and produced only one child per life. It's a dicey proposition that I'm not sure is adequately addressed in either book or film.