Review by Mark Mallon
"The Teacher promised me there would be no killing, and I told you to obey him fully."
 Who shall be the first? I have chosen Lyn Cockburn of the Edmonton Sun. I just read her 17-paragraph article in today's newspaper, but I was royally pissed off at paragraph five. According to Cockburn, Dan Brown paints Opus Dei as "a murderous sect within the Catholic church," in his novel, The Da Vinci Code. She says that they are portrayed as "a cult-like group...mixed up in all sorts of conspiracies and employs all sorts of albinos to do their dirty work."
Cockburn included a satirical tone which suggested that Opus Dei is unfair toward its male followers, who are not allowed the same amount of penance as paid by their female members. (The men only sleep on a plank on weekends, whereas the women get to all week long.) The joke does have a bit of charm to it, but it does not forgive the big hole in her research--she claims to have read the book.
I find it much more likely that she watched the movie yesterday (what is that, two hours of research? Two-and-a-half?) and wrote her article last night. Of course, I don't know this for sure, she could very well have seen an advance screening, and had that much more time to miss details.
I am going to do something I don't particularly like, now. I'm going to write an article that, were I to see it, I would stop reading. I'm going to write an article that people who have neither read the book, nor seen the movie might not want to read. That's right, it's a
SPOILER
In the movie, Opus Dei is portrayed as making dark deals, knowing exactly what the plot is, and intending to destroy the holy grail. In the book, Bishop Aringarosa of Opus Dei intends to acquire the holy grail, and champion it, attracting followers back to the older ways instructed in the doctrine he follows.
In the movie, he talks of the people knowing the secret of the grail being silenced as part of his plan. He openly discusses the Teacher with other bishops, who fear that their extremist methods may lead to their excommunication, but who all believe that the destruction of the holy grail is what is best for the church.
In the book, he is told by the bishops he meets with that the church wishes to distance itself from Opus Dei, and wishes for Aringarosa to make public the story that a difference of views has drawn him to the conclusion that he and the Vatican must go their separate ways, giving him six months to do so before the Vatican does it for him, in what I gathered might be a significantly less desirable way for Opus Dei. The meeting could only be considered secret in that a reader wouldn't learn the true events of that meeting until close to the very end, but if Cockburn doesn't have that kind of patience, well...
There are no secret meetings, there is no malicious intent, there are no dark dealings or armies of albino monks in The Da Vinci Code. The line at the top of this post came directly from the book, right out of the thoughts of Aringarosa. The Albino was not an evil assassin, he was a victim of the Teacher's lies, duped into killing the pillars of the Priory of Sion. He was a weak-minded man who obeyed the Teacher's commands because his friend the bishop, desparate and duped, told him to.
And now, my issues with the movie.
I knew when I went that I was going to be disappointed. Everybody who's ever read a book that was made into a movie knows what that's like. It was no surprise that they left things out, that they didn't explore some important details to their conclusion, and that they would reveal all the bad guys too obviously. What surprised me was the details that they changed. Saunier was no longer Sophie's real grandfather. Rather than meeting her brother and grandmother, she met the whole priory of Sion, about twenty people strong and all conveniently a five-minute drive away from the church, where her grandmother's long silver flowing hair was apparently too much for hollywood to handle. Rather than one cryptex inside another, they cut that thirty seconds out, leaving only the one.
The bank manager's reason for pulling a gun and trying to take the cryptex back to the vault was changed, though it would have taken virtually no more time for it to play out the way it played in the book.
The actor chosen to play the Albino--I like him, I've seen other things he's been in, he's quite good--was the wrong choice. He was supposed to be this great muscular hulk of a man, in whose hands the bible is this tiny thing. That was part of the metaphor, that this tiny thing had so much power over this giant!
And you know what? I thought the visualization effects were hokey and unnecessary, and they spent too much time with the camera on Hanks standing in Paris in the last scene. Even if I hadn't read the book, I'm pretty sure I would have got it without the long and drawn-out instrumental, and the unnecessary camera-pan down through the Louvre. Everyone would have got it if that ten more seconds had been applied to the beginning instead of to the end.
If you've seen the movie, and you don't know which ten seconds I mean, read the book!
Those are my thoughts. What are yours?
Click here to read Lyn Cockburn's article |
