Da Vinci, the movie, decoded

I read the book. I’ve seen the movie. My view: The sound and fury surrounding The Da Vinci Code, the movie, signified, if not quite nothing, certainly very little.

It was, I thought, a good movie, not an outstanding one. I know some found it overlong, even boring. I didn’t. Many thought the verbose explanations of the characters, mainly Sir Leigh Teabing in his exposition of the "real story" behind the Holy Grail and "the greatest cover-up in human history," made the movie drag. I disagree.

The critics, many of whom gave poor reviews of the Ron Howard film, conceded that those who read the book would probably like the movie. Fox News arch-conservative Bill O’Reilly was among those who gave this assessment. Those who hadn’t read the Dan Brown best-seller, O’Reilly added, would find if difficult to appreciate the movie.

But since the world-wide take of the movie so far is well in excess of $200 million, film audiences apparently like it, or are flocking to it out of curiosity, if only to see for themselves what the ruckus is all about. After talking to quite a number of people who’ve seen the film, I have yet to encounter anyone who now doubts his faith, much less is leaving the Catholic Church, because of Da Vinci.

If anything, I found that, compared with the book, the movie glossed over many important themes, and failed to impart some of the richness and complexity of the plot and of the individual characters. But I realize that, at about two and a half hours, director Ron Howard was at the outer limits of what movie-goers find tolerable.

Further, I think he went out of his way to avoid overstating the "disturbing" ideas the book brought out, including the divinity of Christ, his supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene and their founding of a royal line that exists in France to this day, and the Catholic Church’s alleged centuries-long suppression of this "secret."

But the "mysteries" behind the architecture of edifices like the Louvre museum and Church of St. Sulpice in Paris, France, Temple Church and Westminster Abbey in London, England, Rosslyn Chapel in Edinburgh, Scotland, which fill the book with some of its most illuminating and evocative pages, are given short shrift in the movie.

Director Howard obviously decided to focus on the murder mystery. But since a thorough understanding of the motivations of the protagonists, both perpetrators and victims, required explanations of the histories of and personalities in the organizations, secretive and otherwise, to which they belonged, the movie sadly had to take many facts for granted or simply ignore them, in the thought that the viewer would be more interested in the pace of the action that unfolded.

Thus, just as that "disembodied hand" wielding a knife in the pivotal fresco of The Last Supper painted by Leonardo Da Vinci has baffled many experts and is still hotly debated, the principal characters of the movie are left so disembodied they leave no decipherable impression of themselves. We simply do not understand who these characters are or why they do what they do in the movie.

We can all guess that the past must have been prologue for these characters. But since the movie doesn’t get into much detail on those antecedent circumstances, we cannot know whether their acts were simply the result of greed, a homicidal streak, an extremist view of the mandates of one’s faith, or just plain stupidity. Flashbacks on the troubled childhoods of Silas and Sophie fly by much too quickly to be fully appreciated.

Thus, the main characters of the movie, including the albino monk Silas, Opus Dei Bishop Manuel Aringarosa, academician Sir Leigh Teabing, the murdered Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere, and even the "leads" Prof. Robert Langdon of Harvard University and police cryptographer Sophie Neveu, don’t really reveal themselves to us.

The book portrays all these characters as complex and driven individuals, deserving of sympathy in their own way. The movie, however, gives few clues as to whether they should attract sympathy or contempt and, in that sense, was unsatisfying. But, I suppose, many film treatments are that way, because of limitations of the medium.

There are also oversimplifications in the movie plot which either puzzled me or left me amazed at the genius of the characters. Now, again, I know that movies don’t allow overly extended explanations. But, for example, Prof. Langdon seemed to breeze through numerous exercises in decoding certain messages left by the murdered Sauniere. The phrase he scrawled in his dying moments, "So dark the con of man," was unscrambled by Langdon, virtually instantaneously in the movie, as an anagram for the Da Vinci painting, Madonna of the Rocks. In the book, he wasn’t quite that fast a solver.

Nor are we treated to the suspense, agony and trials by error which our dynamic duo, Langford and Neveu, had to undergo in trying to figure out how the Fibonacci Sequence, the Atbash Cipher or Sir Isaac Newton’s missing "orb" worked in decoding messages with meticulously hidden meanings.

But, yet again, to do that might have diverted from the main theme of the search for the true Holy Grail ("the person, not the cup"), and the desperate struggle to evade those who were engaged in the same search but were determined to eliminate all rivals.

And, oh yes, what about the complaints of self-appointed guardians of the faith that seeing the movie would cause mass defections from the Catholic Church? That didn’t even occur to me to during the movie, engrossed as I was in the "action" part of it.

Ron Howard doesn’t allow the audience to forget the persistent police chase of the fugitives Langdon and Neveu, even as Teabing pontificates on the hidden messages in The Last Supper fresco and rails against the "greatest cover-up in human history" at Chateau Villette. I guess that’s what Howard meant when he urged everyone to think of the film as "entertainment," not as serious academic discourse.

Those who regard the film as an attack on the Catholic faith should read the many publications and websites dedicated to "breaking" the Code. There is copious evidence that the book is fiction and that its "revelations" are neither new nor unanswered.

Many Catholics today observe the rituals like robots, but ignore the doctrines and truths underlying our faith. It’s convenient for many to go through the motions, and forget the essentials.

When books and movies like The Da Vinci Code challenge our beliefs, rather than refusing to engage them, we should welcome them as opportunities to reaffirm and strengthen our faith. Otherwise, what do we really believe in? As Prof. Langdon suggests in the movie, that, in the end, is the real question.