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The Da Vinci Code Our rating: Your rating:   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for disturbing images, violence, some nudity, thematic material, brief drug references and sexual content) Genre: Drama, Thriller Theater release: May 19, 2006 by Columbia Pictures Directed by: Ron Howard Runtime: 2 hours 29 minutes Cast: Tom Hanks (Robert Langdon), Audrey Tautou (Sophie Neveu), Ian McKellen (Sir Leigh Teabing), Paul Bettany (Silas), Jean Reno (Bezu Fache), Alfred Molina (Bishop Aringarosa), J�rgen Prochnow (Andr� Vernet), Jean-Pierre Marielle (Jacques Sauniere) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

The makers of The Da Vinci Code have been saying for some time now that their film is not supposed to be taken all that seriously. It's not history, and it's not theology, director Ron Howard has said; instead, it's just a rollicking good bit of entertainment. And leading man Tom Hanks has said it's loaded "with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense," calling the story "a lot of fun."

If only they had taken their own advice. Dan Brown's novel may be the product of extremely sloppy historical study, but even many of the book's critics have admitted that it is a "page-turner," an exciting yarn that carries the reader off on a semi-clever, fast-paced ride. The film, on the other hand, is a dull and plodding bore, and it takes itself far, far too seriously.

Robert (Tom Hanks) and Sophie (Audrey Tatou) are on the run

For those who have not yet read the book or any summaries thereof, the story begins with an albino monk named Silas (Paul Bettany) shooting Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle), the curator of the Louvre museum in Paris. In his dying moments, Sauniere strips off his clothes, cuts a symbol into his own flesh, and scrawls some cryptic messages in invisible ink in various places around the museum. Police chief Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) summons Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), an expert on symbols, to the Louvre and comes to believe that Langdon might be the killer—but while he is plotting to arrest Langdon, Sauniere's granddaughter Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), herself a police officer, helps Langdon to escape. Langdon and Sophie then run all over France and, eventually, England, dodging the police while solving the coded puzzles that Sauniere left behind—puzzles which lead to a secret society that claims everything Christians believe is a lie.

The thing to remember about Dan Brown's novels, and now the adaptations thereof, is that they are fundamentally silly. Few books have made me laugh out loud as heartily as Angels & Demons, the first novel to feature the character of Robert Langdon, in which Langdon makes the ludicrous claim that Christians "borrowed" the practice of Holy Communion from the Aztecs—a North American culture that didn't encounter Christianity until nearly 1,500 years after the life of Jesus. And I have always gotten a giggle from the Da Vinci Code trailer, in which Langdon's eccentric friend Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) gravely intones that he knows a secret which, if revealed, would "devastate the very foundations of mankind." Ah, so grandiose!

Paul Bettany plays the creepy, murderous, albino monk

In the movie, however, Teabing says that the secret he knows would "devastate the very foundations of Christianity," a much more specific, and offensive, sort of claim. And the movie, written by Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), seems to go out of its way to give the story even more historical credibility than the novel does. One of the amusing things about the book is how Brown slaps together as many cultural reference points as possible—from high-brow Renaissance art to popular Disney cartoons—in a sort of post-modern pastiche to create the impression that the conspiracies and secret societies he describes are everywhere around us. But in the film, everything is played with a very straight face, the pop-culture allusions are eliminated altogether (as are some of the book's loopier claims), and our focus stays on the classic and medieval paintings, sculptures and architecture.

In addition, Robert Langdon has been made into more of a skeptic, so that when he talks about the Priory of Sion (the secret society that is supposedly protecting the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene), he refers to them, at first, as a "myth." He even says the group was exposed as a "hoax" in 1967—a claim which prompts Teabing to say, "That's what they want you to believe." Also, in the book, Teabing says that Mary Magdalene was labeled a "prostitute" by "the early church" as part of a "smear campaign," and leaves it at that; but in the film, Langdon specifies A.D. 591 as the date when Mary Magdalene was formally identified as a prostitute. (That was the year when Pope Gregory gave a sermon claiming that Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the "sinful woman" who washed Jesus' feet were all the same woman.)

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