Genre: drama

The Passion of the Christ

Directed by Mel Gibson

Written by Mel Gibson

and Benedict Fitzgerald

Starring Jim Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern, Hristo Haumo Shopov

Classification: 18A

Rating: *

Milton knew it, Michelangelo knew it, but Mel Gibson has got it ass-backwards -- the rule that even artists who are inspired by their religion must still be guided by their art. So where Gibson first goes wrong in The Passion of the Christ (and he later goes badly wrong in all sorts of ham-fisted ways) is in starting with an unquestioned belief that his tragic hero is divine. Now, that belief may be a comfort to him, and to many others; properly handled, it might also make for a great film. But the handling is crucial, because art has obligations that religion does not: It must explore Christ's character, and dramatically establish both his heroism and his divinity. Neither can be assumed. If they are, if aesthetic rules get trumped by dogmatic assumptions, then what's left is not a movie but a piece of catechism. Yet that's not nearly the worst of it -- in this case, the catechism is so obsessively and so graphically bloody-minded that it comes perilously close to the pornography of violence.

Indeed, if you're a non-believer and bring to this non-movie none of Gibson's faith, this is essentially what you'll see: (1) In the first few minutes, a man called Jesus, claiming to be the son of God, gets arrested for blasphemy; (2) For the next two hours straight, the same man gets beaten and beaten and beaten again, scourged and flagellated with whips and chains, so savagely that his face and entire body become a striated mass of red pulp, whereupon, in continued gruesome close-ups, his hands and then his feet are nailed to a wooden cross, on which he suffers further agonies until his merciful death; (3) In the last 60 seconds, the man is glimpsed beside his empty tomb, restored to pristine health save for a stigmatic hole through his right palm.

Okay, you've got the body and you've definitely got the blood, but, as plot lines go, that alone makes for pretty thin gruel. Apparently, this is a story, set in Palestine two millennia ago, that recounts the last 12 brutal hours of a convicted man's life. But who is this pathetic victim, and is there a reason to care? There isn't, because Gibson gives us none, expecting (assuming) that we'll provide our own.

So the questions mount. Like Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, or Martin Scorsese in The Last Temptation of Christ, does Gibson try to humanize Jesus? Not really. He emerges as a brave heart, to be sure, but the guy is passively compliant in his own fate, thereby robbing us of any emotional tension and himself of any tragic status. Well, then, like the recent Gospel of John, does Gibson take the other route and establish Christ's divinity? Again, no. On the rare occasions when the camera can pry its focus off the gore, there are a few quick flashback sequences -- Jesus bantering with his mother in his carpenter days, Jesus instructing his listeners to "Love one another," Jesus sitting down to a last meal with some of his like-minded followers. But these flashbacks have no cinematic context; they carry no affective weight.

Into this dramatic vacuum -- Christ suffers, we suffocate -- I'm pleased to report that the Devil, that old stalwart, makes several cameo appearances. Pale of countenance, blue of eye, shorn of brow, he (portrayed by a she, Rosalinda Celentano) plays a couple of Satanic party tricks and the audience -- at least the horror buffs among us -- couldn't be happier. Alas, his camera time is sadly limited, as Gibson insists on returning to the catechism lesson -- the one that has him continually rubbing our faces in the suppurating ooze of Christ's butchered body.

This unblinking voyeurism gives rise to the film's proud boast of "authenticity" -- a Passion play that does for the Lord what Spielberg did for D-Day, complete with artsy slow-mo and an overbearing score. Sure, there are also the linguistic touches -- Christ and the other Jews speak in subtitled Aramaic, while the Romans make do with something billed as "street Latin" (not, as far as I could hear, like any street I visited in high school). But this aural realism is just the sideshow. The visual big top is the scourging and the crucifixion -- again and again, Gibson returns to the blood-letting. Again and again, we're exposed to the clinical repetition of a single act, until an alleged act of passion comes to seem boring and passionless. Is that not a definition of pornography?

Of course, Gibson the actor has done a fair share of suffering in his time -- in the Lethal Weapon series, in The Man Without a Face, in Braveheart, in Conspiracy Theory, in Signs -- and perhaps he comes by this fixation honestly. But, here, his catechism is near-stupefying in its arithmetical simplicity: The greater the suffering of Christ, the greater the glory of his sacrifice, and the more graphically you depict the former, the more powerfully you imply the latter. Sorry, but the Gospels themselves -- the film claims to be a compendium of the four -- knew better. They all gave the blood short shrift, treating the stuff with aesthetic restraint and leaving the Church to sort out the metaphor of Communion. By contrast, like all fundamentalists, Gibson is no fan of either subtlety or metaphor -- he prefers his cup of blood literal and overflowing.

Naturally, this obsession doesn't give his star much acting room. Too soon and for too long, Jim Caviezel (J.C. to his friends) is forced to exercise his emotive skills under a ton or two of red latex. There, his talents lie buried, awaiting resurrection in a better flick. As for Maia Morgenstern's Mary, and Monica Bellucci's Mary Magdalene, they're stuck in the same posture as us -- just gawkers in the crowd looking on at the horror show. Of the ensemble cast, only Hristo Naumov Shopov distinguishes himself, and only because he gets to play a truly eternal figure -- the waffling politician that was Pontius Pilate.

Finally (did you hope I'd forgotten?), what can be said about the controversy that has dogged the project? Certainly, the bulk of the beatings and all of the killing are done by Roman soldiers, presented here as the most gleeful bunch of sadists this side of Hannibal Lecter. Yet, as in the Gospels, the Jewish leaders are seen to campaign actively for the death penalty, and to cheer enthusiastically at its execution. Also, Gibson does not omit that potentially toxic line delivered by Christ to Pilate: "It is he who delivered me to you who has the greater sin."

That all this sacred text has historically contributed to anti-Semitism is undeniable. Undeniable too, however, is that the "Christ-killer" epithet stems from Christians misreading their own myth. Jesus is compliant, even complicit, in his own fate because his death is divinely ordained -- his only killer is his Father. Had he not died at 33, but lived to a ripe old age and expired peacefully from a coronary occlusion, the myth would lose a bit of its redemptive power. Ultimately, then, the charge of anti-Semitism is, like the Bible itself, open to interpretation, and fraught with misinterpretation.

Still, the controversy turns out to have done Gibson a huge favour. It appears to have blinded many to the picture's far more provable faults, especially to its close-up deification of Christ's flagellated body -- the word made flesh, the flesh made yucky. Looking to heaven, Mel Gibson has made a movie about the God of Love, and produced two hours of non-stop violence. We can only pray that next time, looking to Mars, he'll make a movie about the God of Violence, and produce two hours of non-stop love. That might be porn worth paying for.