Arts & Culture

RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM AT THE CINEMA

by Paul Butler

Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou in The Da Vinci Code

With the remake of The Omen opening on the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year of the new millennium, and The Da Vinci Code monopolizing cinema complexes throughout North America, religious symbolism is certainly in the air. Both movies closely follow their originals.

     The Omen is an almost scene-for-scene remake of the 1976 film of the same title, while The Da Vinci Code makes only slight deviations from the novel by Dan Brown.

     This fact alone makes it surprising that the Ron Howard-directed, Dan Brown story received such unenthusiastic reviews. Whatever the ins-and-outs of where Brown got the central idea for his fiction, the author achieved in The Da Vinci Code what few before him have ever done --spinning a fast-paced action yarn around a challenging concept and getting his readership to focus as much on that concept, as upon the action taking place around it.

     The film of the book is extremely faithful, re-creating the interpretation of the Holy Grail legend found in Brown's novel, and using the same visual clues from da Vinci's work that suggest Mary Magdalene was much more than just a follower of Jesus. Book and film suggest that patriarchal forces within the early Church buried the real significance of Mary Magdalene, and even took great pains to misrepresent her.

     The book had a profound effect on me precisely because gaps in my own religious education made it a revelation. Far from diminishing the importance of the book, the controversy of the court case that followed only reinforced its impact. The legal battle over ownership of the theory behind The Da Vinci Code proved that there really was solid scholarship behind Brown's plot line. What started up as a wonderful speculation ended up as an interesting theory that had existed for some time before the phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code.

     So what got lost between book and film that made one such a sensation and the other, at least for the critics, a disappointing non-event? Maybe it's because Leonardo da Vinci's "code" of the title was no longer a revelation by the time the film appeared. Perhaps being faithful to the book wasn't such a virtue after all, because people were expecting another twist. But this presupposes a significant overlap between readers and cinemagoers, and it's fairly well established there is no such overlap. Many people were, in fact, going to the movie fresh.

     It could be something else entirely.

     Colouring-in characters, as Brown does in his novel, getting glimpses into their pasts as the plot demands, seeing and hearing snatches of religious history, works much less well for many in film than in literature, where pacing is more elastic.

     This may be even more true when there is a genre expectation. Many critics believe that the only measure of success for a thriller is whether or not it thrills. The Da Vinci Code --the movie-- attempts to work on another level.

Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick as Damien and Mia Farrow as Mrs. Baylock in The Omen

     It's a pity that genres should be so constraining, especially when the most innovative work can't be so easily pigeonholed. There is no such problem with The Omen. Both original and remake adhere to the commercial horror/thriller ethos of measuring success by the speed of its audience's heartbeat.

     The plot sees a man tricked by a fallen priest into adopting a baby who turns out to be the "anti-Christ." Fulfilling one of the prophesies in the book of Revelations, Damien has a 666 birthmark and his natural mother is a jackal.

     The remake moves the whole piece up a gear by casting, as Damien's governess, Mia Farrow, Satan's unsuspecting mother in the seminal evil-child fantasy Rosemary's Baby (1968), Roman Polanski's faithful film version of Ira Levin's satirical horror novel.

     But The Omen plot line is too straight to be satire. It is grimly determined to make every religious symbol as literal as possible, just as The Da Vinci Code is determined to unpick the literal to reveal its likely meaning. If The Da Vinci Code's brief is to demystify the signs and symbols that come to us through 2,000 years of Christianity, The Omen's brief is the reverse.

     The Omen provides enormous fun, but no insight. The film version of The Da Vinci Code provides plenty of insight, but, at least to most critics and a considerable number of cinemagoers, not enough fun. Such is the fate, unfortunately, of a "thoughtful" thriller in 2006.

Paul Butler is a writer living in St. John's. His latest novel NaGeira is the part-mythic, part-historical story of one of the first women to settle on the shores of the New World. His website is www.paulbutlernovelist.com