There may be many answers to the question “Who killed Christ?” The Romans. An elite group of Jews. God. All of the above. All of us.
Today, with the much-awaited opening of “The Passion of the Christ,” one rejoinder to that question is: Mel Gibson.
The Oscar-winning director carries out this execution with lavish attention to brutal detail many audiences will find hard to take. Or understand.
Gibson has said that is his point: Moviegoers should be painfully aware of Christ’s sacrifice, of what he physically endured to save humanity. He never cries “uncle.” When he cries out, “Father,” it’s only to ask God to forgive man his cruel ignorance. Those final entreaties make up the very few words actor James Caviezel’s Jesus speaks, except in flashback.
The movie opens with Christ praying in the fog-enveloped Garden of Gethsemane. He and the disciples have supped for the last time and a few of them sleep nearby. Christ has company, however. Satan appears as a hood-shrouded pale androgyne (Rosalinda Calentano), tempts him, challenges him. This taunter returns throughout the movie, reminding us that movies (“The Omen” perhaps) have shaped this “Passion” just as much as the Gospels.
Having been betrayed by Judas, Jesus is arrested. The tussle that takes place in the garden is yet another reminder that the director does not stray far from movie formula. Gibson wanted his Jesus to be more macho than those who preceded him onscreen. The disciples, too, get an extreme makeover, making Christ’s arrest much more of a brawl.
Christ is taken from the garden by the guards of the Jewish religious council. What can only be called a kangaroo court, presided over by Caiaphas, finds him guilty of blasphemy. From the moment Christ is seized, the beatings begin in earnest and let up only when he dies on the cross. There seem to be few people who don’t want to take a whack at this rabbi. It’s amazing he doesn’t die in custody, even before the priest Caiaphas and his council hand him over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.
The good news for postmodern man is that Gibson wanted to make a work of art, not merely a polemic for the righteous. He asked cinematographer Caleb Deschanel to capture the scenes with the lushness of the painter Caravaggio. And art, no matter how much its makers wish otherwise, invites interpretation.
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‘The Passion of the Christ’
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Gibson exerts a directorial authority that makes clear that all his choices were intentional. It is a visually tighter film than “Braveheart.” But it isn’t a better story, and given its source material that’s extraordinary.
The more disturbing news is that almost all of “The Passion of the Christ” artistry has been devoted to a violence we haven’t seen before.
“Kill Christ – Vol. 1” is too irreverent an alternative title for “The Passion.” But the conversation about the uses and abuses of film violence no longer ends with Quentin Tarantino.
“The Passion of the Christ” is a film of artistic ambition and devotion. There’s no arguing that. It is also a movie that assumes too much on the part of its audience by not providing enough backstory on its main character.
Gibson uses flashbacks that hint at this life: Jesus’ mother, Mary (Maia Morgenstern), watches him fall while carrying the cross and remembers him as a child taking a tumble. But they don’t hint at Christ as the great teacher. This is a loss.
Caviezel winds up seeming like a piece of meat. Indeed the sounds of his scourging sound that raw.
There was a time when “The Passion of the Christ” wasn’t even going to have subtitles. The characters speak the language of the time: Aramaic for the Jews and Latin for the Romans. It sounded like box office lunacy. However, Gibson directs his actors to play their characters with such broadness that he could have done without subtitles.
It is not just the Jews who demand Christ’s death who look bad. (And, yes, the curse Caiaphas is reported to have called down – the so-called “blood libel” – is no longer here.) The Roman soldiers are enthusiastic sadists, joking with each other while flaying Jesus. And when Barabbas is freed from his death sentence – and a wounded Jesus condemned yet again – a bit of Gibson’s fondness for slapstick creeps into the scene. And “creeps” is the right word.
Gibson has justified the movie’s brutality in the name of “realism.” But in the case of “The Passion of the Christ” that is a misnomer, to put it mildly. At best the word is a kind of shorthand for making as visible as he can the ineffable mystery of Christ’s gift, to make his sacrifice real.
From the moment the movie opens with a shot of a blue-tinged full moon to its “happy ending,” “The Passion” is laden with non-realistic images of the supernatural and the melodramatic. Slo-mo shots and soaring, elegiacal music hammer the significance of the moment but detract from the gritty reality Gibson says he was trying to achieve.
Directors often blame their use of graphic violence on our perceived threshold for pop-cultural carnage. Linking brutality to a true event, and evoking real bodies is an even more powerful play for our horror response. Spielberg did it in the harrowing shower scene in “Schindler’s List” and again in the first 20 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan.” Anthony Minghella does something similarly miserable and stunning with warfare in the opening scenes of “Cold Mountain.”
Actual violence and brutality are not beautiful or lyrical. But onscreen violence can be exactly what Gibson said he hoped for: It can be lyrical and mournful. It can be stunning in both senses of the word.
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Besides his old-school Catholicism there is another tradition Gibson embraces here. Cinema’s habit of delivering more and more harrowing images of violence. It’s as if directors no longer have confidence in the ability of a story to tap our empathy without assaulting us with viscera.
In an attempt to save Jesus by punishing him enough to satisfy the throng that demands his death, Pilate has him beaten. The scene of his scourging, the stone courtyard, looks like a butcher’s floor at the end of the day.
Charnel house images alone can’t connect us to the profound loss suggested by “The Passion of Christ.” For those who carry an acute sense of that loss and the story behind it, this movie may do what Gibson intended. You may shake with knowledge of the gift.
But there was always a possibility that in trimming Christ’s life from the script, the character of Jesus would not resonate for others as powerfully as he has in story after story. That’s the other passion of Christ and it’s not here.
Finally, that’s only a movie loss. But it is a loss just the same.
The Passion of the Christ
***(out of 4 stars)
Directed by:Mel Gibson
Written by:Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson
Photography by: Caleb Daschanel
Starring: James Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern, Monica Bellucci, Mattia Sbragia, Hristo Naumov Shopov, Claudia Gerini, Luca Lionello
Rated:R for sequences of graphic violence.
Running time:2 hours, 6 minutes
Distributed by:Newmarket Films
Opens: Today at area theaters
