In the new film directed by Mel Gibson, a good man is arrested on trumped-up charges, flagellated nearly to death, then made to carry a heavy wooden cross to the place of execution as his captors continue to pummel his frail, bloodied body. All the while, the man’s own mother and disciples bear witness, watching on in pained, helpless horror. As do we.
You see where this is going: that the film in question is called The Passion of the Christ and that its protagonist is no ordinary human being, but Jesus of Nazareth. Try forgetting this, though, just for a moment — indeed, it may be necessary to do so in order to clear one’s mind of the incessant media fracas that has swirled around this production ever since it was announced that “Mad Mel” Gibson planned to film the Jesus story using dead languages — and you may well find (as I did) that Gibson has made a big, bold, nightmarishly beautiful film not just about the dawn of the Christian faith, but about the awful tendency of human communities (wherever and whenever in the world they may exist) toward self-preservation, intolerance and mob rule. The Passion of the Christ will certainly have special resonance for Christians, but even those indifferent or hostile to the film on historical and/or theological grounds may find themselves moved by its potent depiction of physical, psychological and religious oppression.
The Passion of the Christ is, let it be said, not a particularly subtle film. As reports have suggested for months, the intensity of the violence Gibson puts on screen is graphic and discomforting (and makes Braveheart look decidedly kid-friendly). When Jesus (Jim Caviezel) is whipped by his Roman captors, his skin frays as though it had seams and his blood sprays both his torturers and the ground below. At one point, a large hooked instrument lodges itself in Jesus’ side, taking flesh with it when it’s yanked away. As he proceeds through the streets of Jerusalem en route to Golgotha, Jesus repeatedly falls, pulling the crushing weight of the cross down upon him. It’s all enough to make crucifixion itself seem, as one character in fact suggests, less punishment than reprieve. And by honing in on these final moments of Jesus’ mortal life — the locus of all traditional Passion plays — Gibson has effectively put a magnifying glass over a series of events that, in most prior tellings of this tale, occupy perhaps 20 or 30 minutes of screen time. (There is much slow motion, to boot.)
Some early reviews of The Passion of the Christ (and I’m talking about the ones written by people who’ve actually seen it) have been critical of this overall approach, suggesting that the film’s depiction of the Roman soldiers’ inhumanity toward their prisoner is too unrelenting, even illogical. Yet, to my eyes, the effects Gibson achieves are brutal without being desensitizing — his admittedly aestheticized bloodshed is a world away from the action-movie autoerotica of Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer and, to be truthful, more than a few movies Gibson himself has starred in over the years. Instead, Gibson here seems engaged in re-sensitizing his audience to images of human suffering in a cinematic (and video-game and television-news) era in which such images have become something of a lingua franca. What you won’t find in The Passion of the Christ is the formal purity of a film like Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest or the documentary-style lyricism of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (or, for that matter, last fall’s superb The Gospel of John), but rather the color-saturated wide-screen cinematography, “impact” editing and amped-up digital soundtrack that are the calling cards of the high-end Hollywood studio picture. Ultimately, it comes as no surprise that Gibson once considered leaving the film’s Latin and Aramaic dialogue (effortlessly spoken by its multinational cast) unsubtitled, for this is a movie that speaks fluently in the language that moviegoers around the world now understand better than any other — that of the blockbuster.
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Shot by Caleb Deschanel(The Black Stallion, The Right Stuff), The Passion of the Christ opens on an impossibly blue, moonlit night in the Garden of Gethsemane, where a terrified, sweat-drenched Jesus prays to his Father to save him, moments before being seized by temple guards sent out by the high priest Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia). And while these early moments are burnished with eerie, surrealistic touches — a skulking, slithering, androgynous albino of a Satan figure; Judas Iscariot fleeing from demonic apparitions — what will surprise many about the scenes that follow, given all the pre-release controversy, is their familiarity. Which is to say that, in its presentation of everything from Jesus’ interrogation by the Sanhedrin (and later by Pilate) through to the crucifixion itself, the film (adapted by Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald from the four Gospels and, controversially, from the published visions of a pair of 19th-century nuns) does not differ significantly in content or ideology from the modern cinema’s other mainstream renderings of these events (Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings, Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, et al.). This extends to the charges of anti-Semitism that have been leveled against Gibson and the film, but which really stem from issues that some have with the original biblical accounts. True to their primary sources, Gibson and Fitzgerald depict a cabal of the Jewish religious authorities — here portrayed in a distinctly less caricatured fashion than in many earlier films — as Jesus’ primary nemeses, while pointing out the fact that Jesus himself, as well as his supporters, were themselves Jewish.
