Coda to the ‘Code’

LIKE THE MEGA-BESTSELLER on which it is based, the film “The Da Vinci Code” is full of word puzzles and ciphers. So we’ll couch our reaction to the film, which some Christians are boycotting as a sacrilege, in an anagram of our own: ISOLATE MY VINO.

Properly deconstructed, our puzzle stands for this proposition: Director Ron Howard’s film, which opens today, is likely to be an anticlimax for both devotees and detractors of Dan Brown’s novel.

With some encouragement from the author (who prefaces his narrative with a list of “facts” about the Priory of Sion, Leonardo da Vinci and the Catholic order Opus Dei), critics of the church have embraced the novel as the gospel truth. Catholics and other believers have denounced it as heresy. But the film is not an exercise in theology, radical or otherwise. It’s a chase flick. If Howard pays homage to any higher truth, it’s the Gospel According to Alfred Hitchcock. For Howard, the Holy Grail -- re-imagined as a female descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene -- functions as what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin: a plot device that is insignificant in itself but that serves as an excuse for thrills and chills.

The emphasis on action is not the only reason the film might not be as offensive to Christians as the book. The film also finesses some of the historical howlers in the book that were seized on by Christians and scholars alike. In the novel, a British scholar explains that before the 4th century, “Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet”; in the film, it’s simply observed that “many” Christians of that period did not regard Jesus as divine.

Not that Christians (and especially Catholics) won’t object to large parts of the film. Howard retains the character of an albino Opus Dei adherent who brutally flagellates himself when he isn’t acting as a hit man for a clerical conspiracy. And, even if it serves largely as a MacGuffin, the thesis that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and spawned a royal bloodline is deeply offensive to many churchgoers.

Still, unlike the book, Hollywood’s version of “The Da Vinci Code” makes manifest what the novel disguises with its ersatz erudition -- that the only quest that matters is the quest for entertainment. Or, to unscramble our anagram: IT’S ONLY A MOVIE.