Howard expends similarly energy on personal histories. Nearly every character rates a sepia-stained flashback moment. From Robert Langdon’s spill down a well, to Silas the rabbit-eyed monk’s juvenile indiscretions that lead to his fanatic religious devotion, to Sophie’s disturbing encounter with her grandfather’s sex cult, he dutifully gives everyone several minutes to gaze off to their distant pasts. Too bad none of these backgrounds are explored with any depth, so they come off as traffic accidents on the way to a destination rather than as stops on the journey itself.
It may all have made for high entertainment in the schlocky page-turner medium, but translated to celluloid, it becomes a convoluted, didactic mess--and even worse, it becomes a bore.
As for the question of heresy, the film version betrays little evidence for the charge. Heresy has to have some source in church doctrine to be considered an apostate departure from it. But Da Vinci’s Code’s entire theme, if it may be said to possess one, can be summed up in a single comment from Professor Teabing: "The Greatest Story ever told is a lie!" So while the story takes an unquestionably nasty attitude toward Catholicism, it hardly sets itself up as a divergence from accepted dogma, and so seems no more like heresy than atheism.
Even Christ’s alleged descendent sets herself outside the realm of the Church when she hisses at an Opus Dei monk, "Your God doesn’t forgive murderers; he burns them." While Howard reveals a shameful ignorance of the Bible on this point as I immediately came up with three God-forgiven murderers off the top of my head, the point is his protagonist doesn’t consider the monk’s God her God.
At one point Langdon kneels at the burial ground of a Christian figure, but by that time he has made it clear that it is not a heavenly authority he bends his knee for, but the god in all of us: ''Maybe human is divine," he tells Sophie midway through the film.
A more interesting question is why as preposterous a conspiracy theory as this should hold such wide appeal in the first place. Dare we consult Scripture on the subject and suggest its root lies in the oldest sin in the Book—pride. It seems obvious that at least part of the allure for those who take the Da Vinci Code seriously comes from pride that they are smarter, more clued-in than the average, churchgoing Joes and Janes on the street; pride that they alone, this relatively small group of renegades, have unearthed the secrets that duped all previous ages of men; pride that only they possess the intellect to recognize a con that took in entirety of Christendom.
There’s always a thrill to be had at feeling like an insider--especially when one can gain that feeling for the price of reading an airport novel rather than a serious study of liturgical history or, even more difficult, a serious searching of one’s own soul.