Panning The Code

As Colin Mocherie often says during the "film director" game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, The Da Vinci Code is "crap, crap, crap!"

And as reviewers are confirming, not just theologically, either.

Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post:

The movie Sony Pictures has been desperately trying to position as "the most controversial thriller of the year" turns out to be about as thrilling as watching your parents do a Sudoku puzzle.

Peggy Noonan:

After its first screening in Cannes, critics and observers called it tedious, painfully long, bloated, grim, so-so, a jumble, lifeless and talky.

There is a God. Or, as a sophisticated Christian pointed out yesterday, there is an Evil One, and this may be proof he was an uncredited co-producer. The devil loves the common, the stale. He can't use beauty; it undermines him. "Banality is his calling card."

Daniel Henninger considers TDVC a testament to the apparently bottomless potential and cockroach-like durability of conspiracism:

Here's my theory of The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown was sitting one night at the monthly meeting of his local secret society, listening to a lecture on the 65th gospel, and he got to thinking: "I wonder if there's any limit to what people are willing to believe these days about a conspiracy theory. Let's say I wrote a book that said Jesus was married. To Mary Magdalene. Who was pregnant at the Crucifixion. And she is the Holy Grail. Jesus wanted her to run the church as a global sex society called Heiros Gamos, but Peter elbowed her out of the job. Her daughter was the beginning of the Merovingian dynasty of France. Jesus' family is still alive. There were eighty gospels, not four. Leonardo DiCaprio, I mean da Vinci, knew all this. The 'Mona Lisa' is Leonardo's painting of himself in drag. Da Vinci's secret was kept alive by future members of 'the brotherhood,' including Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and Victor Hugo. The Catholic Church is covering all this up."

Then Dan Brown said softly, "Would anyone buy into a plot so preposterous and fantastic?"

Then he started writing.

So it's decided: the movie sucks. And the novel on which it is based ain't a page-turner, either.

So why make it into a "major motion picture" then? Ms. Noonan had some thoughts about that:

I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents. Why would Tom Hanks lend his prestige to such a film? Why would Ron Howard? They're both already rich and relevant. A desire to seem fresh and in the middle of a big national conversation? But they don't seem young, they seem immature and destructive. And ungracious. They've been given so much by their country and era, such rich rewards and adulation throughout their long careers. This was no way to say thanks.

The flip answer would be, "Because they can." And that membership in good standing in the Hollywood tribe requires "attacking the tribe next door for worshiping the wrong spirits". Or, rather, for not worshipping them. So much for Tom Hanks' self-proclaimed interest in "history".

But leave it to Mark Steyn to echo my peroration:

It seems curious to me that, on the one hand, one can claim this book in general blows the lid off Christ's final days and, at the same time, that in particular it's full of period tics that shouldn't be taken literally. These Christianesque bestsellers surely testify to something, but God knows what (as it were). It's interesting that so many non-churchgoing readers are interested in Jesus, disheartening that they're so Biblically illiterate. Still, given the success he's had dismissing the premise of the New Testament as a fraud, perhaps Dan Brown could try writing a revisionist biography of acclaimed prophet Muhammad.

Just a thought.

Don't hold your breath.