Film Review of The Passion of Christ

Newmarket Films

Gibson’s Film Is a Daring Meditation on Christ’s Sacrifice

In Pier Pasolini’s seminal work The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the vast majority of the film is committed to imparting the teachings of Jesus, as he serenely strolls from parable to parable uttering the familiar sacred idioms that have now been fully disseminated into secular vocabulary. Pasolini often floods the screen with the prophet’s unassuming, uni-browed visage, his immobile facial features accentuating the authority of his compassionate words. His crucifixion and subsequent resurrection are terse and understated, barely even serving their proper roles as climax and denouement to the film. In this Gospel, Christ is less a man than a visual summation of his words.

Director Mel Gibson takes an emphatically different approach to his subject in The Passion of the Christ, representing the teachings of Jesus through a gore-drenched recreation of the final twelve hours before his death. Here, the son of God is a wholly human figure, and Gibson constantly reminds his audience of this with an unceasing depiction of shredded flesh and spattered blood. The effect is alternately piercing and numbing.

The indescribable atrocities committed upon Jesus’ increasingly carcass-like body in the initial torture scene are heartbreaking, until the recurring image of the elated torturers flaying mercilessly achieves a somewhat tedious tone. The march in which Jesus bears the cross to the point of his crucifixion is similarly excruciating, but he has one too many dramatic falls for the experience to have a fully realized impact. The wounds that the film inflicts on his audience are rarely left fresh, but exposed for so long that they are allowed to scab over.

Nevertheless, Gibson eventually succeeds in overwhelming his audience with the kind of potent visual poignancy unseen in his previous directorial work. In one remarkable shot, the camera takes an overhead God’s-eye view of the crucifixion site, underpinning the magnitude of the event by exhibiting the individuals’ relative irrelevance. Furthermore, every aspect of the persecution becomes a multi-sensory experience, as each lashing is accompanied by a vivid shower of crimson and unnerving sound effects. At one point, a Roman soldier flagellates Christ with a whip of broken metal tips, the shards embedded and then ripped from his torso. As this is done, numerous close-ups of the resulting cuts are accompanied with the squelch of tearing skin, amplified to a horrendous volume.

The telling of the story is equally effective, as screenwriters Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald (Wise Blood) find most of their narrative might in the passion plays’ minor characters. Particularly moving is the transformation of Simon of Cyrene, played with bitter conviction in a breakthrough performance by Jarreth Merz, who initially helps carry the cross with great reluctance, but by journey’s end is risking his own life in Christ’s defense. Perhaps the film’s most moving sequence is provided by an anonymous woman who gracefully offers Christ a bowl of water.

For all his endless proselytizing about faithfulness to the Gospels, Gibson strays from the narrow Biblical path quite often. Pontius Pilate is given a disproportionate amount of screen time as he agonizes over his decision to crucify Jesus, while such a conflicted Pilate cannot be found in any of the Gospels. In a blatantly inaccurate flashback to Jesus’ youth, we see an enthusiastic carpenter apparently constructing mankind’s first high table, as Mary remarks, “This will never catch on.” And despite his many triumphant experiments (the film wouldn’t be nearly as effective if it had been performed in English), Gibson remains a war director at heart, and his villains are assured their appropriate ends even if such demises are nowhere to be found in the good book.

But these deviances belong to the world of historical debate, and are only minor distractions from an otherwise important artistic work. Though violence is the film’s major theme, what resonates from The Passion of the Christ is not necessarily its brutality, but rather the significance of his sacrifice. There are only glimpses of Christ’s words in the movie, and his resurrection is given minimal screen time, but these are provided in such well-timed respites that their resounding impact is ultimately The Passion’s greatest, most awe-inspiring achievement.

Zero Narrative. Zero Characterization. One Blockbuster.

“Wow,” I exclaimed to myself during Jesus’ 39 lashes, a centerpiece of Mel Gibson’s The Passion, “Catwoman’s got nothing on this soldier’s cat-o’-nine-tails’ skills.”

As I consider myself a somewhat sensitive person, I have to become very distanced from the guy being beaten if the aspect I concentrate on is the aggressor’s technique: it surprised me how little I cared about this character’s life. I am not being callous, but there are three fatal flaws that damage the film for nonbelievers: almost no characterization or narrative, a spectacularly large amount of violence and almost all of the Jews are evil Christ-killers.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the film barely has a narrative. The Jewish priests decide to kill this guy, Jesus (James Caviezel). To that end, they pay one of his men to betray him and then take him from Roman authority to Roman authority until they find someone who will give them the right to crucify him.

Once they receive the OK, the Jews and their cruel Roman surrogates beat Jesus in inventive ways not pondered at a masochist’s convention. And then they beat him again. And then they beat him again. And then they crucify him.

In Gibson’s mania to present the extent of Jesus’ suffering, character is lost. By the end of the film, Jesus begins to resemble a piñata more than a man. The effect is that it is hard to understand quite what the point of all this is. It is never clear why he is so dangerous. It is never clear why he doesn’t take his numerous opportunities to speak up and prevent his death. It is never clear why everyone is so passionate about this presence, who, in the film, shows as much depth as Tyrese in 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Even the villainous Caiphas, the head Jewish rabbi, is a straw man. He is only characterized by his desire to kill Jesus. There is no subtlety, only his desire to kill this man, the hollowest of villains. Mary Magdalene, played by red-hot actress Monica Bellucci, has even less to do. The extent of her interaction with Jesus is to wash his feet in a flashback sequence and sob with mother Mary as they watch Jesus get led to his death. But since the audience has never been exposed to these characters, their mourning comes close to farce. I was reminded of middle ages mourners for hire, who would tear their clothes on cue, whenever a rich man died.

Oddly enough, the only deeply felt character is Pontius Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov), who comes off as nuanced but ultimately unwilling to risk a rebellion to save one madman. After Pilate meets with Jesus, he discusses the nature of truth with his wife, symbolizing his interest in understanding this mysterious man. This is such an odd gesture because Pilate, one of two heathens positively portrayed in the film is, in the historical record, capriciously violent and, as such, doesn’t really evoke any more feeling than any of the other characters.

The only really effective scene is Jesus’ interaction with Satan, played by Rosalinda Celentano, who creates a scary-ass presence. The audience gets scared and so connects with the scared Jesus, giving us an emotional connection to him for the first and last time, before the violence begins full throttle.

The violence is physically exhausting and, ultimately, numbing. Blood streams off the screen far over the level I’ve ever previously seen in film. At one point, a strip of flesh is actually torn off. The crown of thorns is pressed directly into his forehead. During the crucifixion, the nails are driven through Jesus’ flesh. Each instance of Jesus’ pain is lovingly photographed to make sure the audience doesn’t miss any details. Although that might help accentuate the suffering and thus the holiness of Jesus’ experience, by the end, these shots begin to resemble pornography, complete with a money shot.

As pornography begins to get old after a while without anything in the narrative to connect to, so does this violence. The audience is just numb to any more blood or horror.

During this seemingly endless savagery, the audience is directly implicated twice, once by Jesus and once by Mary Magdalene, as if to ask, “Look at what is being done to this great man. What are you going to do in response?” The problematic response based on the movie itself is that we must revenge ourselves upon the Jews, a feature that makes this film implicitly if not explicitly anti-Semitic.

As many problem as I had with the film, it is easy to see how believers can connect with it. This is the story that they have heard over and over again and now it’s acted on screen. Therefore, Christians have a stake in the fates of the characters and the hour-and-a-half run up to Jesus’ death becomes almost unbearable in its detailed depiction of his glory.

Gibson defends the film by saying that he wanted to be faithful to the texts, but there are two problems with his defense. First, though I don’t presume to be a Biblical scholar, I have read enough commentaries by some who state that there are definite inaccuracies. Mother Mary goes to Roman soldiers for help in one scene, which isn’t right. Although the subtitle is clipped out, Pilate still proclaims to the Jews that “His blood is on your hands,” even though this is only in one gospel and unnecessary to the story. Nowhere does Pilate have that discussion about truth with his wife. As it was against Jewish law to crucify, the Jews would not have taken the initiative in the crucifixion. The difference is that Gibson used some anti-Semitic accounts by a 19th century nun in order to pad out his story.

The other big flaw is that no matter how closely the film accrues to the accounts of the last 12 hours of Jesus’ life, Jesus’ messages are not in this period. It is how the “evil” people of the time react to his messages that he gets into this position, but this period is entirely devoid of his messages, and, as one has to react to what is on-screen, this becomes a film about violence instead of loving God.