PATRICIA MARTINEZ
Staff Writer
Mystery. Adventure. Conspiracies. The Da Vinci Code has it all, and now, Code fanatics can see their favorite book play out on the big screen.
Dan Brown’s worldwide bestseller is coming to life under the supervision of Oscar-winning director Ron Howard. Howard teamed up again with Oscar-winning writer Akiva Goldsman. The two won the Oscars for Best Director and Best Writer, respectively, for the film A Beautiful Mind in 2001.
The cast for their new project includes Tom Hanks, who will play Robert Langdon alongside Audrey Tautou. Tautou will play Sophie Neveu, a French cryptologist. The cast also includes Ian McKellen and Alfred Molina.
With the film weeks away, the reaction at Pepperdine was not so enthusiastic. Katrina Wills, Events Coordinator at Pepperdine and Da Vinci Code reader, questioned the film adaptation of the book.
“When a book is really good, people are never quite satisfied with the film,” Wills explained. “The movie will lose the enjoyment of reading the book.”
The public’s addiction to the book has been compared with craze over J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Code fanatics insist that the best part of the book is its fast-paced story.
“It has history, mystery, and adventure – all things that draw people in,” Wills said.
Fellow Code enthusiast Christine Paulson adds that she also enjoyed “how cleverly some of the details were entwined into the story.”
As the second installment in Brown’s trilogy, which began with Angels and Demons, the book has stirred up controversy since its release in 2003. The book tells a fictional story along the lines of a detective novel with historical “facts” in between. The controversy stems from the book’s opening claim: “The descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
The book assumes to tell the “real” story of Jesus’ life, covered up by the Catholic Church for centuries. According to the book, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who later became pregnant with his child. The evidence for this can be found in a number of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, including the “Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa.” These paintings have clues which point to the real Holy Grail – Mary Magdalene, the carrier of Jesus’ bloodline. The book also debunks the notion of Jesus’ divinity, a very serious claim.
The fictional subplot of The Da Vinci Code involves the two main characters, Langdon and Neveu. With the help of Langdon, Neveu attempts to crack the code left behind by her murdered grandfather, beginning the adventure of a lifetime.
Because of the opening claim, many readers find it hard to discern fact from fiction in the book. It does not help that the fictional character Langdon provides most of the historical facts which the book relies on for its claims.
The Catholic Church, in addition to other Christian communities, is critical of the book, outraged by its negative depiction of Catholic leaders and their supposed involvement in the conspiracy to cover up major details of Jesus’ life. Many historians also criticized the claims made in the book.
Since its release, scholars of divinity and history have written in opposition to the claims made in the book, and, in some cases, written their own books ripping apart Brown’s evidence. In lieu of the movie, Catholics and evangelicals have recently come together to form “truth squads,” producing books, websites, TV documentaries, DVDs and study guides countering Brown’s claims.
“If I was a bishop or someone of authority in the Catholic Church, I would take it as a personal attack,” Wills sympathized. “The book portrays the leaders of the Catholic Church as liars, and though it’s fiction, it reads as an actual history.”
Despite, or more likely because of, the controversy of the book, its popularity grew immensely, not only in the United States, but across the globe as well. Paulson admitted that she first picked up the book out of curiosity.
“I initially heard about it because of people talking about the controversies,” Paulson said.
As a Christian, it is easy to see how some of the evidence can build resentment in readers. Code fanatics at Pepperdine seem personally unbothered by the book’s details, but, instead, show concern for the reactions of those who are not Christians.
“The book is unfair to people who don’t really know much about Christianity and people who take what they read as truth,” Paulson said.
Overall, Pepperdine Code readers did not take the book too seriously.
“I would take it as entertaining and interesting to weigh in your mind, but it did not change my beliefs,” Paulson said.
A petition to ban the film has already been made to the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board. The movie will be out on May 19 (if it gets past the board), but will premiere on May 17 at the Cannes Film Festival. The decision will be made on May 3. If the controversy does not make you want to head out for the movies, the actual film itself should. With Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou under the direction of Ron Howard, what more could you ask for?
05-12-2006