By Armond White

The DaVinci Code 

Directed by Ron Howard

“Believe!” Tom Hanks urged in The Polar Express. “Don’t believe!” he now advises in The DaVinci Code. Hanks’ vacillating goes beyond the characters he portrayed in that animated holiday film and his current role as a religious scholar embroiled in a mysterious cover-up. Both films epitomize the mindless, non-committal stance of Hollywood secular humanism. It might be laughable if The DaVinci Code weren’t so blatantly offensive.

All that keeps The DaVinci Code from being absolutely enraging is Hanks and director Ron Howard’s obvious insincerity. They’ve adapted the millions-selling Dan Brown potboiler novel by according it the fake gravitas of serious literature. (This includes lamely copying formula from superior box-office hits Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Godfather, Part III and The Man Who Knew Too Much.) Hanks and Howard probably don’t mean to be anti-Catholic; they just don’t really care. (Neither do many of the same critics who did back flips inside their own skin about inferred offenses in The Passion of the Christ but now excuse The DaVinci Code as “just a movie.”)

No critics have questioned the absurdity of Brown’s premise—a hermeneutical treasure hunt that begins with a possibly satanic murder in the Louvre. Howard’s X-box-style flashbacks to antiquity illustrate Brown’s proposal that Christianity (Catholicism) was a conceit established to consolidate political power in 13th century Rome, and thus became the source of all warfare and injustice in the West, including the oppression of women and the suppression of a female religious sect. 

Hanks’ Professor Robert Langdon gets dragged into a secret conflict in which an unpopular Catholic group, the Opus Dei (here labeled “fascist”), oppose wide-eyed adherents to a cult that venerates Mary Magdalene (deemed Jesus’ wife and mother of his child). Idiotic Opie then reverts to his dreadful Oscar-winner, A Beautiful Mind, with its facile rip-offs of James Bond movies, adding a spooky-silly pop-up assassin (a dangerously devout albino monk played by Paul Bettany).

Equally maddening, The DaVinci Code contributes to the culture wars, returning us to that ugly moment when mainstream media besmirched the values represented by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Now agnostic Hollywood gets to strike back at Gibson’s fervent—and popular—expression of Christian faith by attempting to discredit it through Brown’s anti-historical claptrap. Our entire media apparatus colludes to promote Brown and Howard’s outrageous hypothesis as a summer tent-pole event. 

“What if the greatest story ever told is a lie?” Ian McKellan’s crippled scholar roars. Well, that’s a hateful, prejudicial proposition to millions of people, as would be Holocaust denials or Mohammad cartoons. Imagine some filmmaker basing an action movie on the scandalous text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But Hollywood frequently bashes Catholics, and The DaVinci Code fits today’s fashionable, atheist-Left position that self-righteously mixes political argument with religious affront.

To treat The DaVinci Code strictly in terms of genre obviates the film’s deeper insult and ignores its threat: Under the ruse of “entertainment,” important spiritual issues are subjected to trivializing plot devices. Howard’s gimmicks and Hanks’ hypocrisy further the nihilism and faithlessness that has ruined film culture. Their fumbling, dishonest narrative merely jolts viewers. It never rises to the yearning for revelation or deep feeling that distinguished Gibson’s film. 

Akiva Goldsman’s incoherent script sanctions Brown’s literary puzzle, yet it may make you gasp at how gullible—and unintelligent—millions of readers must have been. Major clues are either based on syntactical nonsense (the term “sangreal” does not mean “royal blood” in any iteration of French) or else propose bogus art interpretations (McKellan’s risible analyses of Leonardo’s The Last Supper fresco). None of this pseudo-modernity is as honest or fair as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1957 prologue to The Ten Commandments: “For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.” But that was back in the days when Hollywood respected all religious beliefs.

Neither credibly intellectual (even hokier than Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s attempt in the ’80s at highbrow anti-clericism) nor aesthetically impressive (the pessimistic spy-movie tone undercuts any search for enlightenment), The DaVinci Code is simply blasphemous. I know that word is meaningless in some circles, so try this: Hanks and Howard’s lack of conviction undermines the moral basis by which art can be understood and some people choose to live. When Hanks’ professor concludes, “Jesus was an extraordinary man, a human inspiration. That’s it. All that matters is what you believe. Why does faith have to be human or divine?” it’s just cruel blather. On their way to worship Mammon, Howard and Hanks leave us with nothing. 

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