I'm always curious when a book becomes hugely successful. What did the novel do to transport its audience on a satisfying story journey? I'm also curious when a hugely successful novel becomes an underwhelming Hollywood movie. This review explores why the book succeeded and the movie failed.

I teach that a story functions as a promise, and that a promise arises from an issue of human need. In most cases, these needs are deeply felt: a desire for a second chance, a need for redemption, to gain acceptance, to be acknowledged, etc. In some cases the human need at the core of a story is more cerebral. In The DaVinci Code, Robert Langdon's main issue is his belief that the feminine aspect of God and divinity has been deliberately displaced and maligned by patriarchal religions, primary the Catholic Church. To Robert, this has created an out-of-sync, unbalanced world. The fulfillment of the promise of Code is that Robert will be able to unmask this conspiracy.

The plot of The DaVinci Code revolves around whether Robert can solve a code left in a museum by a murdered man and avoid being arrested for that murder. He is aided by Sophie Neveu, who helps him escape the museum and uncover and understand what the clues are trying to tell him: that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and this truth has been covered up by the church.

The action of the novel—Robert's escape from the museum aided by Sophie; the relentless, murderous pursuit by Silas to silence a threat to the church; the machinations of a church Bishop—unfolds as a puzzle piece. Each clue that Robert and Sophie uncover and figure out leads them forward to understand the next piece of the puzzle.

How Robert feels about understanding this puzzle is mostly internal, and the novel conveys his strong feelings about the displacement of the feminine aspect of God. I call this narrative tension. It's the tension a story character feels over resolving or fulfilling some issue in a story. Hugely successful stories often have characters who experience great narrative tension. Even though Robert's narrative tension is mostly cerebral, it's made accessible to the story's audience.

Sophie's narrative tension in the story is also mostly internal; it revolves around her feelings about her grandfather and what led them to be estranged.

It is the minor characters in the novel, Silas and his patron, Bishop Manuel Aringarosa, who most intensely generate narrative tension around the outcome of their actions. The Bishop seeks to force the Catholic Church back onto a more disciplined, conservative path; Silas struggles to keep his blood-thirsty impulses converted into religiously sanctioned violence. Captain Fache, who pursues Robert with great passion and persistence, has a reputation to uphold, and his vain pursuit of Robert threatens that reputation.

While a book can generate narrative tension by delving into what a character thinks and feels, Hollywood movies mostly generate tension over the outcome of actions. Because Robert's narrative tension is so cerebral and internal, in the movie Robert's issue is turned into a crisis of faith; that as a child trapped in a well he stopped believing in God. Early in the movie we learn that Robert lost his faith, and at the end of the film, Robert regains his faith in God.

Unfortunately, that wasn't what the novel was about, so most of the action taken from the novel is unrelated to what creates the fulfillment of a story promise in the film for Robert around the issue of faith. There is a moment when a character tells Robert that the time has come for him to be a participant in history and not just an observer, but that idea doesn't particularly take root in the action, either.

A critical issue in storytelling is transferring the tension a character feels about an issue to the audience. Once an audience has internalized a story's or a character's narrative tension, the audience HAS to know how the story turns out. That's what makes a story compelling. That narrative tension is generated in the novel; it isn't in the movie.

All this makes Robert, as a movie character, fairly passive and uninteresting. He's mostly along for the ride, reacting to events. He's an innocent man on the run who must solve a series of puzzles to clear his name. But why I should care – that transfer of narrative tension – never fully happened, because the issue of faith for Robert is haphazardly thrown in to the movie in a way that it doesn't generate much tension.

The movie took another major deviation from the book in the relationship between Sophie and her grandfather, Jacques Sauniere. In the novel they have been estranged because Sophie walked in on what she probably through was an orgy but was actually a pagan ritual about the male and feminine aspects of divinity. The movie eliminates that thread of the novel (I would guess to avoid offending main-stream Christians) and, instead, in a major revelation, has Sophie revealed as a descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus.

That's a powerful revelation, but it again disconnects the action of the movie from what drives Sophie in the novel. If the movie had framed who she really is as a question for Sophie, the movie could have generated narrative tension around her search for her true identity. But the movie doesn't frame that question, so the fulfillment of the action for Sophie, learning who she really is, doesn't generate much impact.

In terms of structure, The DaVinci Code works as a puzzle piece. In a puzzle, every piece has to be an exact dimension and shape for all the pieces to fit together. The movie tried to recreate the puzzle that made the novel so hugely successful by resizing some of the pieces. The end result is a movie that didn't recreate the success of the book because the pieces don't really fit together to form a cohesive whole.

Re-imagining a book as a movie can mean taking what is subjective, reflective and thoughtful and re-creating it to be objective and action-oriented. It's easy to do and hard to do well.

The first Harry Potter movie also suffered greatly from a lack of narrative tension. While the book is a chronicle of relentless narrative tension, there's no real narrative tension for Harry in the movie until two hours in when he's asked to make a choice between having his parents back in the magic mirror and siding with evil or doing what's right and not regaining his family. The choice Harry makes defines him as a character, but it's also a painful choice, and his pain is made accessible to the story's audience.

I've had people tell me The DaVinci Code is not well-written. What the novel does well is transport its audience. There's no substitute for that in storytelling, and generating a narrative tension that makes a story compelling is a large part of that process.

©2008 Bill Johnson