"The Da Vinci Code"

Conservative critics have bemoaned "The Da Vinci Code" as a subversive attack on moral decency and a shocking challenge to religious tradition. If only.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou

May 18, 2006 | Dan Brown's 2003 conspiracy mind-blower "The Da Vinci Code" is a prime example of clumsy artfulness, a book that boasts perhaps some of the most idiotic sentences ever laid to paper ("Prominent New York editor Jonas Faukman tugged nervously at his goatee") and yet keeps you turning the pages almost in spite of yourself. Killer albino monks? Pagan sex rituals that defy everything the Catholic Church holds dear? Tell me more! Secret societies that revere Mary Magdalene, Renaissance artists who doodle blasphemous in-jokes in the corners of their paintings, tubby cardinals desperate to make sure the general public doesn't find out that women really are the center of the universe: "The Da Vinci Code," a blend of pseudo-facty information and mischievous, provocative invention, is a flying meringue pie headed straight for the church's kisser.

But "The Da Vinci Code" has also captured the popular imagination in a way few other recent novels have. The novel's faux-scholarly folderol is part of the fun (even if Brown doesn't always seem to be in on the joke). And the fact that Catholic and conservative Christian groups have come out so strongly against the book only make its paranoid visions more believable. If the church is so worried that "The Da Vinci Code" will lead the general public to believe that killer Opus Dei monks actually exist, you start to wonder what the organization is really trying to cover up: Do they eat babies? Host Black Mass hootenannies? The sky, and not merely Brown's extremely active imagination, is the limit.

But everyone knows that more people see movies than read books, even books that are as popular as "The Da Vinci Code" has been. And now Ron Howard's movie version of the novel -- which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday night, and begins nationwide on Friday -- is here to stir up more trouble. Vatican officials have been fuming, publicly, that the movie is filled with slander and errors, even though, of course, there's no way they could have yet seen it; one former nun has advised Christian moviegoers to see "Over the Hedge" this weekend instead. Better to embrace the reality of talking animals than the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have borne children together.

With negative publicity like that, who in their right mind wouldn't run to see "The Da Vinci Code," at least out of curiosity? But the unfortunate reality is that the target of these groups' ire and frustration is a somber, staid movie, too long, too self-serious, and too slow-moving to have the kind of dazzling impact they fear. The movie is by no means a disaster: The performances, particularly those of Tom Hanks (as the hero, Harvard symbology expert Robert Langdon) and Ian McKellen (as Langdon's wry friend and rival scholar Sir Leigh Teabing), are sturdy and -- at least in Hanks' case -- understated. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman did perhaps as well as anyone could have in adapting the book, finding ways to dramatize and compress the explications and digressions that are its lifeblood. And the picture, shot by Salvatore Totino, has a lovely, burnished look -- its palette of soft grays and browns echoes the muted clarity of the Leonardo Da Vinci paintings that play such a crucial role in the plot.

There's nothing assaultive about "The Da Vinci Code"; because it isn't loaded with noisy action, you get the sense that it was at least made for grownups. But its aura of stiff dignity works against it, too. The picture just doesn't have enough zing -- it's so stately that it almost seems to be apologizing in advance for any potential controversy it might cause.

Next page: A haunting scene -- and a beautiful actor -- cannot break the "Code"