Originally published 3/22/04
The Passion of the Christ
Director: Mel Gibson
Writers: Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson
Producers: Bruce Davey, Mel Gibson, Stephen McEveety
Stars: James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Gerini, Maia Morgenstern
(Okay, this movie asks a lot of its audience, and the talk about the movie in the media has asked even more. I like to think that reviewing a movie should be a pure exercise, but this is not an ordinary movie. And so, because I think it’s worth it, I’ll spend a few words up front addressing the “issues”. If nothing else, it will get them out of the way.
Also, I make no claims at being a Biblical scholar, and so none of my criticism is levied against the Bible and Christianity, or whether or not something in the movie was accurate to that source. Like with any adaptation, the ultimate purpose is to examine how well the thing works as a movie, which is a wholly different medium.)
The stuff that’s not really a movie review but seems expected
In the summer of 1996 I performed in Goldenwest Community College’s production of Jesus Christ, Superstar. After rehearsals, I’d often drop by to see a girl I was dating. “What did you do today, honey?”
“Oh, not much. Killed Jesus.” I’d reply.
What I mean to say is that a culture that has already turned the defining event of one of its major religions into a rock/soul piece of musical camp has long since passed the point of questioning whether or not it is appropriate for Mel Gibson to make, with his own money, a feature film out of it. And so let it take up no more space in this writing.
As for the film’s supposedly insidious Anti-Semitic content, I say with all honesty that I left the theatre hating the Jewish people no more than I did when I went in, which is to say not at all. Nor, I suspect, does it have any such effect on the people who go on at length about such dangerous hidden messages. It is not for themselves they write, but for the “other” people, the “stupider” people who lack their critical perception. These writers fret that the unwashed masses will be driven to hysteria by one thing or another and awful tragedies will result.
I would suggest, first, that anyone who uses this film as an excuse to do violence against any race had it in them to begin with. I’d also like to suggest, if those worried scribes guarding us from racism must write about something, that they go back to Birth of a Nation, which is genuinely, bald-facedly racist. And not racist in that oh-it-was-the-times-they-lived-in kind of ignorant way, but in a “pay attention people, because this race is full of lazy, shiftless, evil, ugly perverts who our out to steal our rightful place in society and violate our beautiful daughters, and we should hunt them down” kind of way. There’s always another essay to pull out of Birth of a Nation. But that movie’s not making headlines right now, is it?
The Passion of the Christ depicts Jews and Romans both, which is fitting, since they were there at the time. Among each group are examples of nobility, weakness, mercy, cowardice, sympathy, treachery, compassion, greed and all other aspects of the human condition. It makes no more sense to blame a race than it would be to say that I and all my descendents will wear the blood of John F. Kennedy, since a fellow Caucasian (or two or three, depending on whom you ask) pulled the trigger.
According to the story itself, no one person or race was responsible, and time and time again, we are reminded, it was the will of God Him/Her/Itself that it happen. As it goes in the New Testament, Jesus was put into a troubled land and troubled times for the express purpose of bearing the worst suffering mortal life could dish out.
It’s so easy with a film like this to get distracted from discussing the thing itself, so Important are the exterior issues. Permit me then, in my own guilt, to grope for a segue so I can actually review the thing now.
The genuine reviewing part
Actually, there is one group that is singularly treated with contempt and scorn by The Passion of the Christ – sneering morons. They come off very poorly. The guards who unrelentingly beat and torture Jesus (James Caviezel), all while cackling “heh heh heh” like henchmen in a Batman movie, do get dealt a pretty short hand. But this story isn’t about them, it’s about Jesus Dying For Our Sins.
I have been asked in school classrooms if I know, understand, or believe Jesus Died For Our Sins. I have been asked on city buses. People regularly bang on my front door to tell me about it. My own beliefs on that topic will stay my own, and it doesn’t strike me that Gibson intends to sway us one way or another about whether this is indeed the Truth. I think his goal, grandly ambitious and impressively achieved (though not always), is to describe as unflinchingly as possible what it means to die for our sins, and why it’s the key to this particular religion. And to its credit, to watch this movie is for it to be crystal clear.
The answer is not the suffering itself – the bloody, brutal, unblinking depiction of a man taken in his prime and, step by awful step, tortured until no life is left in him. It’s in the quiet moments in between, when Jesus recalls telling his followers – “no servant is greater than his master. If they persecute me, they will persecute you.” As grim as that sounds, the point is, with Jesus’ death, anyone can be forgiven and brought into the hereafter.
When he talks about tearing down the temple and rebuilding it in three days, he is not talking about any old temple. He is announcing that God is changing His/Hers/Its game plan, and just to prove a point, He/She/It puts a son (and, if you buy the concept of the Trinity, God Him/Her/Itself) among us to suffer the worst pain which can be known on Earth. If you can come back from that, the Resurrection is saying, you can come back from anything.
And oh, is there suffering. We watch thorns shoved into a head. Skin flayed from a body until there seems not an inch of Jesus left not criss-crossed with bloody tears and wounds. Blood sprays. Chunks of flesh are torn out. Nails are hammered through hands and feet. And we do not miss a moment of it. This is as absolutely, authentically violent as a film can be and not qualify as snuff, and it will make you squirm in your seat. There is hope when all is said and done (sorry to spoil the ending), but the point is that the hope cannot be fully comprehended until we have seen the pain.
Caviezel provides every expression of agony that can be perceived underneath layer upon layer of spattered makeup. But he’s good in the moments of quiet, too, when his human side wrestles with his fate and dreads what he can see coming so clearly. The other leads all do what they can as representative figures in a larger canvas (one that frequently recalls Caravaggio, thanks to world-class cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s dark, rich photography.)
Some of the most powerful moments are the simple ones, as when Jesus tumbles to the ground in front of his mother (Maia Morgenstern) and she flashes back to watching a toddler Jesus fall and hurt his knee, and she knocked everything over in charging to soothe him with her love. Caveizel, too, shares that moment with her, realizing what it means to be beyond even the healing power and care of a mother and needing to hand yourself over to a higher power.
It is when Gibson strays from such simple depiction that the film loses its true emotional charge. When Judas (Luca Lionello) sets off on his path towards insanity and suicide after betraying Jesus, Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) unleashes Scary Special Effects in pursuit.
Don’t get me wrong, they are scary; digital monsters and children deformed by makeup. It torments Judas and frightens me. But was it necessary for the Great Deceiver to borrow tactics from Freddy Krueger? Fear of Satan should run deeper than just hoping he doesn’t make Something Scary pop up and go “boo”. It has a very deliberate intent, and may well be spelled out in the Bible for all I know, but to me it felt like the wrong emotion to aim for in the moment.
Gibson is a gifted and perceptive director, and he likes working on a grand scale. Have 9 years really passed since he gave us Braveheart? Surely at least one Lethal Weapon sequel could have been sacrificed to get him behind the camera again. Here he makes the most of a clearly tight budget – one or two of the sets look a bit wobbly, but he doesn’t linger on them long. What he gets for his money is, more often than not, pretty stirring spectacle – John Debney’s evocative score, with a few echoes from Peter Gabriel’s work on The Last Temptation of Christ, helps make the movie feel more expensive than it is.
His biggest problem is with crowd behavior. Like those ever-cackling Roman Guards, every background shot conveys a single idea with hordes of people expressing the emotion of the moment as baldly as possible. Whether crying in empathic agony or fists wagging with murderous rage, those shouting hordes are the one area of his canvas given sketchy attention, and in a film that tries to square itself with the horrifying details of the Crucifixion and every charged and complex emotion around it, it’s an unfortunate oversight. I’m not one to suggest how you bring depth to a guard whose job it is to scourge Jesus, but surely an Oscar-winning filmmaker can do something about it.
A Post-script with an important moral
It’s probably a little too late to say this, but on the off chance that even one person might be swayed, I’ll relay a little anecdote. It might seem silly, but it has a point:
I must have been about 6 or 7, and every Sunday my family went to St. Ignatius’ church in Cincinnati. My mom would let me play with the calculator from her purse to keep me quiet, but every so often I’d look up to see what was going on and if I was supposed to be standing and singing now. There was an awful lot of talk about this Jesus person, and I’d look around and see the pictures everywhere of the long-haired, bearded man with the peaceful look on his face.
And at a certain point each week, a man would take the podium and talk for a long time about one thing or another. It was, I know now, the weekly sermon, but when I would look up and see, addressing the audience, a long-haired, bearded man with a peaceful look on his face, I would simply think – oh, that must be Jesus, and go back to what I was doing.
Hey, I still believed in Santa Claus, and he came to our church at least once a year. That Jesus might be here talking to us wasn’t a stretch in my mind.
One day after the service my parents hung around the entrance and waited for the priest to come out. He appeared and started talking to the children; and he had a duck with him. Look, my mom said, he has a pet duck. Want to go pet it?
Now I thought this was cool. Every year my parents let me stay up so I could watch the Magic of David Copperfield TV special. Every year (at least back then), Copperfield would do one trick with his pet duck, Webster.
Wow, I remember thinking, Jesus has a pet duck. Just like David Copperfield.
Now for all of you who want to stone me for equating the King of Kings with the Master of Illusions, I acknowledge I was a weird little boy from the get-go. But I don’t think this is completely out of bounds; in fact I think of it whenever I want a reminder about how wonderfully random a child’s way of sorting out the world can be. And so the moral of our story is:
Do not take children to this movie if you have any decency in you. They will not understand. They will either be driven to nightmares or utterly desensitized by the kind of horrific violence you’re always complaining about HBO, MTV, and video games for.
I saw a group of kids who looked about 11-12 come out. One was asking casually about what video game they should play over in the game room. Another was sarcastically yelling “Mommy, Mommy!” to taunt the one among them who had been disturbed.
The movie is going to be around for a long time. Long enough to let your kids grow up. It takes maturity to grasp this movie’s meaning. It’s tough to face the violence and glimpse the message behind it, and you cannot and should not force that on people. Please, please, please, if you have yet to go, remember this before you do.