Film Review: THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST ** (out of 5)
The final hours of Jesus of Nazareth, from his doubts in the Garden of Gethsemane to his crucifixion on Golgotha, rendered in excruciatingly graphic, apocalyptic detail.
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a movie that has stirred vigorous controversy in nearly every quarter of American life, a bold, confrontational exercise in redefining current religious discourse. Gibson’s most interesting accomplishment, in fact, has been his ability to promote this movie at a vulnerable time in the life of the United States, when the nation is in conflict with terrorists who use religious dread to motivate their soldiers, and all good presidential candidates must give the correct answer if asked about their devotion to God, which they most certainly will be if they don’t volunteer. In such an atmosphere, with ticket sales soaring beyond all reasonable expectations and film critics scrambling to become biblical authorities before their deadlines, it’s almost impossible to give the film any kind of objective critique.
Nevertheless, I’m going to try. Mel and his Passion deserve the same balanced consideration as any other film in our Age of Hype. That is to say, before trashing or praising any movie, it’s important to examine the various elements of the movie itself, from the all-important screenplay to the director’s creation of an onscreen world and the contributions of his collaborators, to look beyond the surface of the movie, including its controversies, and discover its real merits as a piece of filmmaking.
In the case of The Passion, there’s little doubt that Mel Gibson has a full command of cinematic rhetoric — he knows how to move the camera and when, he’s a good actor who is able to turn around and, as a director, draw affecting performances from other professionals, and he is equally good at conceiving a visual style that portrays his vision of the world through sets, costumes and pictorial composition. His vision tends toward emotional extremes, which is also true of him as a movie star, but that is not necessarily a detriment. Movies are an emotional medium to begin with, bigger than life, more-real-than-real by virtue of their size, and any filmmaker who doesn’t use the sheer scope of movie imagery to their advantage is either not thinking, or is trying to sell you a deconstructionist bill of goods.
But Mel Gibson can also be a real bully when he steps behind the camera. You may have heard that The Passion of the Christ is a two-hour chamber of horrors, with endless depictions of Jesus being flayed for the sins of the world before he is nailed to the cross. The actual running time for this key selling point is closer to fifty minutes. The film is not exclusively about Roman instruments of torture and how they were used, but it does take up about half of the film and it does become the salient feature of the movie after awhile.
Which brings me to the movie’s core — any movie’s core — its screenplay. The arcane title, drawing on medieval traditions of the passion play, has already told us that the humiliation and blood of Jesus will take center stage. For those who haven’t been to Sunday school lately, the word “passion” came into English usage with its Latin spelling intact some time during the 13th century, when roving bands of actors performed Church-authorized recreations of Jesus’ trials, and it originally meant suffering. Likewise, the English “Christ” has its origin in Latin, the language of Rome when it assumed control of the Church, and before its pronunciation and meaning was altered by some ten or more centuries of Anglo-Saxon usage it was christus, meaning “anointed,” or “messiah.” Thus, the movie is going to be about the suffering of the Messiah.
I stress these finer points of language only because Mel Gibson stresses them incessantly in this suffering-filled movie, as a means of giving his work an aura of legitimacy intended to trump other film adaptations of the New Testament. Aramaic was the language of first century Judea, where Jesus spent the documented years of his life, and Mel, in a very literal-minded way, has first written a script based on the gospels, then had its dialogue translated principally into Aramaic, with snatches of Latin for Roman mouths and a smattering of Hebrew for those darned humorless Pharisees. It does give the film an eerie layer of authenticity, pushing the ancient world of the story into the foreground, and it’s a shrewd bit of iconoclasm, undercutting the usual representation of biblical folk as modern people in alien clothes speaking a familiar vernacular.
But the new practice doesn’t necessarily legitimate the whole enterprise. As a writer, Mel insists he was merely transcribing the gospels into docudrama, which is a disingenuous argument, to say the least. Nevermind that the gospels don’t always agree on every historical event or word spoken — Mel leans heavily on the book of Matthew for most of his story — but the film is shot through with the filmmaker’s own inventions time and again, filling willy-nilly the inevitable gaps that arise in four different versions of the same narrative. This is not to say that he doesn’t have the right to invent or speculate, as when he inserts a suggested origin for the Shroud of Turin. Inventing is what dramatic writers and filmmakers do, it’s part and parcel of the creative process, giving artistic structure and continuity where it did not previously exist, provoking an audience to think about what they are seeing. But it doesn’t qualify as an audio-visual replacement for the Bible; it becomes Mel Gibson’s bible, which viewers should recognize as a document of a very different kind and intent.
By focusing on the last day of Jesus’ life on earth, and specifically on his suffering for humanity’s sins, Gibson was running the risk of losing what Jesus was really about, and I’m sorry to say he fell prey to his own dramatic traps. From the film’s opening scene, The Passion of the Christ assumes its viewers know the whole tale, and regardless of whether they should or not, this strategy is just bad storytelling.
The first hour is taken up with Jesus’ arrest; his subsequent trial before the High Priest Caiaphas, in which he answers some of the charges against him, namely that he claims to be the son of God; and a second trial in which Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea, tries to avoid responsibility for his execution. Though Gibson often resorts in these passages to melodramatic devices more appropriate to an action movie — music that is too loud, jarring transitions from one location to the next, lots of running — his film to this point remains a compelling reinterpretation of the source.
Then comes the second hour, a nearly blow-by-blow portrayal of merciless, monotonous flogging and crucifixion, and blood-blood-blood-blood, and bleeding, copious bleeding. The cruelty of Jesus’ Roman jailers, only hinted at in the gospels, is given a horrifyingly realistic portrayal, supplemented with some minor, truncated flashbacks to the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper. These snippets seem to have been inserted as an afterthought, offered merely as a brief respite from the film’s real subject, pure agony.
On a shallow level, this creates a real sense of pity for Jesus, but compassionate viewers may also find themselves pleading an all-important question at the screen: WHAT DID THE POOR MAN SAY? What statements could have been so threatening to the perceived natural order that he would be tortured so abominably, far beyond the treatment of the murderers and thieves who were being punished alongside him? I know the answers to these questions, but I found myself yearning for the filmmaker to step up and acknowledge them anyway. Gibson’s gruesome, clinical depiction of Jesus’ final hours may have some scholarly antecedents, but he’s become so consumed with their presentation that he has neglected the larger meaning of the story.
The physical world of ancient Judea is recreated with great attention to details, but not the psychological world, the spiritual and intellectual milieu in which this tragedy took place. There’s not a three-dimensional character in the entire movie. Gibson almost achieves a lone, human twist on the usual movie archetypes with his portrait of Pilate, who is always an attractive figure for dramatists to expand upon and elucidate, but this is the only instance, and Gibson’s flourishes here are, once again, based on quite a bit of speculation outside of anything found in the gospels.
Meanwhile, those original books offer a great deal of dramatic incident revealing what Jesus meant, to his own time as well as ours. Gibson is not interested in any of that; he is only interested in the most rudimentary, good vs. evil portrayal of religious intolerance two thousand years ago, the better to concentrate on the gore and the pain. To that end, he has been pretty sloppy in picking and choosing snatches of the gospels that suited his purposes, remiss in supporting his own claims to authenticity, and relentless in manipulating public discussion of the film before it came out, painting himself as a martyr whom the forces of “liberal” ideology were trying to silence. It worked beautifully as a marketing strategy, but the monster box-office the film has generated clearly shows he is more P.T. Barnum than persecuted artist. He took a big gamble with millions of his own dollars, yes, and he made sure that it paid off, too (which is no doubt still causing chagrin in the boardrooms of those major studios who turned down the honor of distributing his movie). Thanks to his year-long promotional stumping, The Passion of the Christ made back its negative cost in one day.
The only certain thing this proves is that high concept thinking still turns huge profits. You no longer have to tell the story of Jesus with any genuine depth or scriptural understanding; that sort of thing has been done to death, hasn’t it? Instead, you cut to the chase, rethink the details of scourging and crucifixion and you’ve got yourself a hit.
I want to be clear, I’m not being cynical or disrespectful toward the Bible or Christianity; that is not the province of a movie critic. But I am being disrespectful toward Mel Gibson and his bullying, medieval, blood-obsessed movie.
I submit that if you raise the stakes in your presentation of Jesus’ suffering, you are also obliged as an artist to raise the stakes in presenting his original message to the world, to portray his reasons for taking on the sins of humanity in no uncertain terms. And The Passion of the Christ does not meet that obligation in any way. For that to happen, Mel Gibson would have to be capable of a little humility, just a tiny measure of it, and he would be able to forgive the world as Jesus did and make films that healed people’s hearts rather than dividing them.
The Passion of the Christ
directed by Mel Gibson; screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson; director of photography, Caleb Deschanel; edited by John Wright; music by John Debney
with: James Caviezel (Jesus), Monica Bellucci (Magdalene), Claudia Gerini (Claudia Procles), Maia Morgenstern (Mary)
2 hr., 7 m.; Newmarket Films, rated R
release date: February 24
NOTES:
I consulted some good books long before writing this review. A recent one was the excellent Pontius Pilate by Ann Wroe (Modern Library, 2001), which is based on impeccable scholarship and gives a rich portrait of Judean life in the 1st century A.D.
Another was The Revised English Bible (Oxford University, 1989), to my mind the best of many late 20th century attempts to translate anew the original, ancient Greek texts of the New Testament into modern English.
As for alternative representations of Jesus in film history, the list is very, very long. For me, the most thorough and moving remains Franco Zeffirelli’s six hour mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977), which is a reverent and beautifully photographed epic, with a fine all-star cast and a meticulously researched screenplay by Anthony Burgess.
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
