The Magdalene Review

Today, in spite of a mean headcold, I caught a matinee showing of The Da Vinci Code. I probably would have waited to see it, but darn that Fandango.com, they just make it too easy to buy tickets in advance. I purchased them on Thursday just in case the theater was sold out, given that this is the opening weekend for the “biggest film event of the year.” I needn’t have worried; the theater was only filled to about 60% of capacity.

The most remarkable thing I can say about the movie is that it played out on the screen almost exactly like it played out in my head as I read Dan Brown’s novel. Now, this can mean a couple of things. Either Dan Brown is very good at generating in his readers the setting he has in mind, or Ron Howard was so painstakingly faithful to the book that not a prop was out of place. Perhaps both possibilities are true, but whatever the case, the end result is that I watched the movie feeling like I had already seen it. Sure, it was fun to see Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen and Jean Reno acting out the characters that had mostly remained faceless in my mind’s eye, but I was also perfectly comfortable getting up for some popcorn during the film without feeling like I would miss anything important.

Dull, plodding, boring, literalistic; these are all adjectives used by critics when referring to the movie. I had hoped that having lived my life with DVC for the last few years would have rendered the experience a bit more exciting, but what I found was that the criticisms of the movie were perfectly warranted. I was impressed by the film’s deft avoidance of the more controversial dialogue in the novel, though, and was almost interested by a few flashbacks of a pregnant Mary Magdalene with curly red hair. I’ll admit that the hair on the back of my neck stood up at least once during a couple of dramatic pans of Mary Magdalene’s sarcophagus, heightened as they were by a fantastic film score. Magdalene’s alabaster jar even made more than one appearance in the movie, but tragically, it contained a single red rose. (Could there be anything more cliché than a single, long-stemmed red rose, under any circumstance? Hello, Phantom of the Opera. Why not a lily? It would have even been appropriate given the importance placed on the fleur-de-lis in the story.)

The buzz on the Mary Magdalene email lists about the movie is generally supportive. A few people have gushed about how beautiful and empowering it is to see the sacred feminine making such an appearance in popular culture, but it just didn’t have that vibe for me. It felt tired. Overwrought. Milked dry. When I left the theater with my husband, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the movie will do more to end the DVC phenomenon than to perpetuate it. It was as preachy as the book, minus the action and excitement. Although I suppose it is a cultural marker to see goddess-worship and Christianity mingled in this manner on the big screen, it didn’t feel momentous in the least. As the audience filed out after one of the most anti-climactic final scenes ever, I caught mumbles of how long and boring the experience had been.

My advice? Wait for DVC on DVD.