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Saturday,
May 20, 2006

Okay, Ron Howard, what did you do with the REAL ending of "The Da Vinci Code"?

Let me preface this by confessing that I have a weakness for religious thrillers. I don't know if it was the three years of Catholic grammar school, the mother who delighted in comparative religious studies, or seeing THE OMEN at an impressionable age, but I usually enjoy stories that involve the Catholic church, mysterious goings-on, a doughty lead determined to get to the bottom of it all, and at least one splashy supernatural event.

So of course I read THE DA VINCI CODE. And lo, my reaction was, "...eh." I already knew the McGuffin, wasn't overly shocked by it, and was more taken aback by the so-so writing style coupled with the inexplicable bestseller status of the book. But to quote Dana Stevens at SLATE, THE DA VINCI CODE was indeed extremely visual, so when I found out that Ron Howard was filming it, I thought, "That might actually be one of those great rarities -- an improvement on the book."

I saw it this afternoon. And apart from the occasional bobble, such as Sophie Neveau acting sorta dumb (such as when she asks Robert Langdon what an anagram might mean. Honey, you're the cryptographer -- why are you asking a religious symbols professor to break an anagram?) and Langdon being much more devout than he was in the book, it was actually pretty good, right up until the last ten minutes.

But those last ten minutes -- oy.

AND YES, THERE ARE SPOILERS HERE -- DON'T READ UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW RON HOWARD MADE STEAM COME OUT OF MY EARS.

All righty, then. In the book, Sophie (newly revealed as the scion of Christ) is finally reunited with her brother (who's been in hiding with their grandmother all these years, under the Priory of Sion's protection) and makes a date for a dirty weekend in Venice with Langdon. The grandmother, a force in the Priory and a sharp woman to boot, gives Langdon some useful advice on the location of the Grail; Langdon has an epiphany back in Paris, tracks down the ancient Rose Line and realizes the Grail (aka the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene) is buried under the inverted glass pyramid in the Louvre Museum.

Which was an ending I could live with. And then I saw the movie, where:

• Sophie is the only living scion of Christ, despite the astounding family resemblance of the docent at the Roslin Chapel (who, in the book, turns out to be her brother).
• Sauniere wasn't really her grandfather (he "rescues" her from the accident that killed her family; apparently none of the cops ever questioned an old man walking away from an accident scene with a little girl in his arms. It also neatly sidesteps the book's Priory ritual where Sophie sees granddad having sex with grandma, because God forbid the scions of Christ should ever engage in rumpy-pumpy).
• Her grandmother, instead of being a powerful member of the Priory and quite possibly the next Grand Master, becomes some simpering thing whose only purpose for Sophie is to "welcome her home."
• After spending most of the movie as a smart, tough cookie, Sophie turns into this helpless, sexless little girl who needs to be protected by the Priory (the members of which don't look like they could protect a snow cone in an icestorm).
• Langdon opines that hey, just because Jesus had a wife and kids doesn't mean he's NOT divine (I can only assume that this is brought on by Sophie laying hands on him while they were in an enclosed space and "curing" his claustrophobia).
• Langdon advises Sophie in a roundabout manner to be a good little Christian and protect people's faith, sealing his instructions with a chaste kiss on her forehead. There is no mention of fun and games in Venice.
• How does Langdon find the grail? No mention of the grandmother dropping hints -- in fact, the Priory apparently thinks the secret of the Grail has disappeared with the death of the three seneschals and Grand Master. No, Langdon figures it out all by his lonesome by cutting his face while shaving, staring at a trail of blood in the sink, then frantically flipping through the book THAT HE WROTE until he finds a reference to a "blood trail."

Oh. My. GODDESS.

Look, I understand that sometimes a book needs to be changed in order to get it on-screen. But where the hell do I begin to describe how badly this has been twisted out of true?

Let's start with Sophie's brother -- by getting rid of him, the balance of male and female, represented by the union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and supposedly one of the driving forces of the Priory, is broken. This is reinforced when Sophie learns her family's history and magically turns into a powerless little girl who needs to be protected, which craps all over the whole point of Brown's take on the Grail story -- that Mary Magdalene was not only Jesus's wife and mother of his children but the person he chose to run his church, Jesus being the world's first male feminist. This alone had me screaming in the car for about ten minutes.

By having Langdon say, "Well, golly, I felt Jesus with me when I almost drowned as a kid, so maybe he really was the Son of God, even if he did have a wife and kids," Jesus's humanity, another big point of the story, is completely negated. And what the hell was that whole "laying on of hands" schtick? The scene with Sophie giving a junkie money for food was more than enough to suggest her genetic goodness -- now she has to have superpowers, too?

And by Langdon being the only person to know the location of Mary Magdalene's bones, it not only makes the Priory look incredibly stupid, but it also puts this symbol of religious gender equality into the keeping of a man who, earlier in the movie, inplies that the emperor Augustine united the Roman Empire under Christianity because those nasty male & female-worshipping pagans started performing atrocities (whereas the bad guy suggests that the Christians started it. Just fabulous -- nice piece of propaganda there, Ron).

So, let's recap -- the divinity of Christ is reasserted, Sophie (and, by implication, her entire gender) is rendered helpless and in need of protection, and Langdon is the good Christian man who solves the riddle and wins the prize. In other words, Howard gutted the power of the book's controversial ending and turned it into a classic conservative "Christian/Man = good, Freethinker/Woman = bad" crapfest, which will at least make the fundies happy.

I didn't even like the book that much, but at least I respect Dan Brown for having the stones to come up with an explosive central hypothesis and stick to it. This piece of noisome garbage is just pathetic.