The Gospel According To Gibson

After months of impassioned denunciation and dogged promotion, after plenty of media hatchet jobs and offensive remarks, after the whole controversy has reached a fever pitch--it turns out the joke is on us. The most salient feature of The Passion of the Christ is not any presumed anti-Semitism. Instead, offered up for our salvation is one dispiritingly shoddy piece of filmmaking.

A look back through film history suffices to show that The Passion has its work cut out for it in measuring up to the greatest in religious cinema. Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) brought scripture to the screen in a powerfully direct neorealist style. Martin Scorsese's Jesus narrative, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), related to the Gospels on unorthodox but no less serious and heartfelt terms. In The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Ordet (1955), Carl Theodor Dreyer indirectly addressed Jesus' martyrdom and resurrection with a profound Christian spirituality. The Passion, on the other hand, manages to channel the kitsch of Hollywood Biblical movies from the '50s and '60s--not to mention contemporary epics--more than its maker would ever admit.

Mel Gibson's labor of love--his rendition of the last 12 hours of Jesus' life--trucks in tired clichés, blunt formal effects, and a remarkable lack of imagination for a film so obviously striving to convey transcendence. While the movie aims at operatic grandeur, it comes across as merely bloated and grandiose. Piety may warrant such a lofty tone, but success inevitably requires a sure artistic vision.

The Passion begins post-Last Supper with Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane on a misty, indigo-bathed night. With the shock timing of a horror movie, Satan materializes out of the shadows into the camera's line of view. This pale, hairless, androgynous creature--of more than passing resemblance to The Lord of the Rings' Gollum--pops up throughout The Passion to torment his rival. For all the advance talk about authenticity, this bizarre addition is only the first of many significant deviations from the Gospels.

Once the Jewish temple guards capture Jesus, thanks to Judas' weak-willed greed, a late-night, impromptu interrogation is held. The indignant temple elders, led by Caiaphus (Mattia Sbragia), condemn him of blasphemy and turn him over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov). Following the Biblical story, Pilate sentences Jesus to a scourging and then crucifixion. Gibson works from an amalgam of the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, but also has no qualms about spinning his own version of events.

Advance claims about realism are also overstated: The Passion is relentlessly stylized. A musical score of ominous rumblings and mournful wails almost never wanes, over-embellishing the underlying emotions in nearly every scene. The movie's dominant formal effect is slow motion, which forces the viewer to fixate on everything, above all Jesus' riven, flayed flesh and his agonized facial expressions. What could have been powerful if used judiciously becomes a technique for aestheticizing the film's constant pain and violence. This path leads directly to the more troubling dynamics of sadomasochism.

The Passion installs salvation through suffering at its center. Daring us to flinch, the narrative zeros in on Jesus' physical torture, making submission and the experience of bloody violation of the body become the core of Christian faith. About three-quarters of the film consists of graphic punishment. We see Jesus get flogged by a cat-o'-nine-tails, pierced by the crown of thorns, collapsed under the weight of the cross, and hammered through with nails. Yet the presentation of all this quickly loses its luster of audacity and fails at its seeming goal to rejuvenate the believer's perception of brutality. It gives way to tedium. How much monotonous cutting between reaction shots and slow-mo fixation can one take?

Though never out-and-out anti-Semitic, The Passion is far from unproblematic when it comes to its portrayal of Jews. Gibson makes a number of unusual decisions that tend to make it easier to blame either certain Jews or Jews in general for Jesus' death. In the film's most radical move, Pilate is viewed as a sympathetic, conscience-stricken ruler, cowed into punishing Jesus by the vociferous, bloodthirsty demands of the temple elders. This interpretation not only flies in the face of historical evidence, but also stands as an exaggeration of even its closest source, the Gospel of Luke. New scenes include Pilate confiding in his wife and, later, her taking pity on Mary and Mary Magdalene.

Those looking out for the Gospel of Matthew's infamous blood libel curse ("His blood be upon us and upon our children" 27:25) won't necessarily find it. In a particularly disingenuous bit of tinkering, Gibson has left it in the movie, spoken in Aramaic yet unsubtitled; its implications lay uneasily dormant.

It is hard to determine where The Passion stands on all these matters because none of the film's characters emerge as fully developed, well-rounded figures--the threat of offensive stereotyping is ubiquitous and seemingly indiscriminant. This suggests that the stock types and caricatures reflect Gibson's simple limitations as an artist just as much as his failings as a tolerant individual. Whatever the underlying reason, though, one cannot excuse the results. Characters slip into insulting, one-note roles: the Jewish elders as an evil cabal of hook-nosed rabbis; the Jewish crowd as a mob stand-in for Jews in general; the Roman guards as buffoonish, sadistic henchmen; and--especially gratuitous and reprehensible--King Herod as a decadent, effete queen. Gibson essentially never misses an opportunity to crudely position antagonists to Jesus.

However, in the final scenes, the film's emphasis on Jesus' teachings goes a little way toward tempering some of the hatred. The Passion's operatic register finally clicks for a brief period, due to Jim Caviezel's moving delivery of Jesus' final words on the cross. Looking to the sky, he says, "Father forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). But then the moment passes, and all of The Passion's embarrassing flaws come flooding back.