Owen Gleiberman: More thoughts on ''Da Vinci''

Owen Gleiberman: More thoughts on ”Da Vinci”

I’m always happy when people are buzzing about a movie, and The Da Vinci Code, if anything, has turned out to be a zestier conversation piece than it is a film. What follows are some random notes and thoughts, on the book as well as the movie, prompted by the DVC phenomenon as it has unfolded over the last couple of weeks.

— There are reasons to like and dislike Dan Brown’s novel, but why have movie critics been so relentlessly snobby about its prose? A.O. Scott, in the New York Times, calls the book a ”best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence,” and Anthony Lane, in his New Yorker pan, asks: ”If a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence.”

Let’s be clear: Dan Brown writes in a swift, direct, plainspoken movie-on-the-page style. No one is pretending that he’s Flaubert, but he’s a far more elegant wordsmith than, say, Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy, and his descriptions of cathedrals and artwork have an appealing visual clarity. To dismiss this novel because it’s written in a popular utilitarian style is really code for saying that one is ”above” it. I suspect the real rub is that The Da Vinci Code is pulp fiction that insists on taking itself seriously. But where’s the crime in that? The fact that Brown dares to write about religious ideas in a non-scholarly voice is the key to the book’s appeal, and movie critics who spend much of their time bending over backwards to treat cookie-cutter blockbusters without condescension are in no position to be turning up their noses at it.

— There’s been a bit of a controversy inspired by a line in my review — specifically, the assertion that Martin Luther, the German monk and theologian whose teachings inspired the Reformation, believed Jesus and Mary Magdalene to have been intimate (though not married).

To set the record straight, here’s the relevant quote from Martin Luther, which was written in 1532:

”Christ was an adulterer for the first time with the woman at the well, for it was said, ‘Nobody knows what he’s doing with her’ [John 4:27]. Again, [he was an adulterer] with Magdalene, and still again with the adulterous woman in John 8[:2-11], whom he left off so easily. So the good Christ had to become an adulterer before he died.”

This quote has already been cited in articles about The Da Vinci Code that appeared in Time magazine and the New Yorker. Does it prove, definitively, what Luther believed? Here’s a sampling of the debate — pro, con (scroll down to May 23), and agnostic.

— What’s the most important aspect of the novel that the movie leaves out? I would argue that it’s nothing less than Dan Brown’s ultimate thesis about the evolution of Christianity — i.e., its suppression of the ”sacred feminine.” In the movie, the notion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had descendents is the cornerstone of the conspiracy. The Church, as presented, is guilty of covering up a fact — the human proof of Christ’s bloodline. That, of course, is true in the novel as well, yet what gets muddled, if not lost, in the movie is the spiritual significance of Christ’s having been married. Throughout the novel, Dan Brown uses the lighting-rod issue of Christ-as-husband to ask, in a far more general and embracing way, What happened, over the course of two millennia, to women in the church? Were they ever more central? Why did goddess culture — an undisputable truth of history — fade? The movie pays lip service to these issues, but they’re no longer pivotal. And without the emotional backdrop of such questions, The Da Vinci Code is reduced to a contrived ”What if?” instead of a resonant ”If only!”

— Ron Howard may be less than a great filmmaker (though at his best, in A Beautiful Mind, he’s no slouch), but he has to be reckoned something of a genius at failing upward. Remember the last Howard film to receive such scathing reviews? It was the reviled kiddie mega-hit How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Now, The Da Vinci Code has become another of Howard’s critical bomb/commercial smashes. Reading the vicious notices, he must be hanging his head all the way to the bank.

— Debate is what it’s all about, isn’t it? There is much in The Da Vinci Code, movie and book, that is patently made up (e.g., the existence of a sacred underground society called the Priory of Sion). Yet what I think has proved liberating to so many readers, and now viewers, is getting reminded, in a basic way, that the Bible, whatever one’s faith, is a work of man as well as God. Considering that the Gnostic gospels, taken seriously by countless scholars, were discovered a mere 61 years ago, the meaning, and history, of Christianity is by definition evolving as we speak. The churning sense of discovery that powers The Da Vinci Code is really a code for that evolution. Is it any wonder that everyone who reads it, and now sees it, wants to crack it?