Release Date: February 25, 2004
Starring: James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Maia Morgenstern, Hristo Naumov Shopov, Mattia Sbragia, Rosalinda Celentano
Directed by: Mel Gibson
Written by: Benedict Fitzgerald, Mel Gibson
Distributed by: Newmarket Films
MPAA Rating: R (sequences of graphic violence)
The Passion of the Christ, director Mel Gibson’s traditional, conservative, and detailed account of the final hours of the life of Jesus Christ, is one of those movies that is impossible to deconstruct and analyze and discuss in a review written on deadline, within hours of viewing it. Much as the tradition of Jesus’ teachings have defied conventional classification for over 2,000 years -- among those who see him as the savior of humanity as well as those who view him as merely an interesting moral philosopher -- this film eludes any sort of neat, convenient compartmentalization in a critical sphere.
It is, most relevantly, a relentlessly exhausting, excruciating, and stunning depiction of torture and execution, which should resonate strongly with followers of the Christian faiths, who believe that Jesus died to open the gates of Heaven and pave the way for all humankind, and also with secular audiences, who will wonder how anyone could take so much physical punishment to the extent that Christ does in this very graphic movie. But The Passion is also more than a film. It is a firebrand and a polemic with regard to the timeless issue of anti-Semitism, made, if not to wage the debate and direct the controversy, with at least the knowledge that it would inspire both. These are arguments that no one critic, nor a body of religious scholars, nor even a world of people, can possibly hope to put an end to, making The Passion the rare movie that is seemingly and simply too big to get around.
Ironically, and despite this, The Passion is a movie that will probably produce a critical response of enormous and possibly unprecedented proportions -- as well it should. It is undeniably well made. It is also a challenging movie, demanding of both the director and the viewer, which is a rare combination that is almost never seen in Hollywood today (to be clear, Gibson made this $25 million movie on his own). It is so brutally vivid and honest that the charges of anti-Semitism leveled against Gibson and The Passion, already widely publicized following screenings held for religious and political groups in advance of the film’s theatrical release, will appear irrelevant during a first viewing. There is so much human suffering on the screen that to ask who is responsible seems almost trivial, like arriving in Hiroshima in the aftermath of nuclear disaster and asking for the name of the pilot who dropped the bomb.
It begins the night before Jesus’ execution, in the garden of Gethsemane, in a scene that is well known to those who have read the Gospels: Christ (James Caviezel) prays to God that he will not have to endure what he knows will transpire over the next 12 hours -- his own (wrongful) arrest, torture, and execution -- while at the same time recognizing that it can happen no other way. This is perhaps his most human moment in a film in which Jesus is depicted as utterly confident in his own fate and filled with a superhuman strength that could only exist in a God made man, a fact that bears pointing out because the biggest complaint against the last great movie about Jesus, Martin Scorsese’s just-as-controversial 1988 film, The Last Temptation of Christ, was that it portrayed Jesus as too human (in that movie, Christ, as played by Willem Dafoe, struggles to accept and even denies his divinity on several occasions).
No such complications exist in Gibson’s movie: In The Passion, as Jesus prays on the night before his execution, he is tempted by Satan, a ghostlike figure played by Rosalinda Celentano and one of Gibson’s most effective devices (Satan is seen throughout the film, lurking in the crowd, always leveling a chilling, icy blue gaze directly into the camera), who says that no man can carry the burden of the whole world’s sin. Christ is afraid, but unwavering. He sends his heel crushing down on a snake that has coiled up next to him, and when the Jewish authorities come to take him away, he is as forthright as they are cowardly. “Whom do you seek?” he asks them, and when they reply Jesus of Nazareth, there is no hesitation on his part: “I am he.” The difference between Caviezel’s Jesus and Dafoe’s Jesus is vast and clear; if they were running for president, Caviezel would be a conservative, and Dafoe a liberal. But more importantly, Dafoe’s Jesus never could have survived Gibson’s movie; Caviezel’s Christ makes him look like a pansy, and if the two met, Caviezel would tell Dafoe to quit his whining, because there’s a world of souls to save and no time to lose.
Time is certainly not lost in Gibson’s movie, which condenses the final half-day of Christ’s life into about 130 minutes but simultaneously expands it, affording the viewer the opportunity to scrutinize every detail. Frequently, the director plays with the viewer’s perception of time. In the Gethsemane scene, Gibson slows the action down, emphasizing the gravity of the situation (this is essentially the moment at which Christ’s fate is sealed) before speeding it up to depict the blunt, visceral skirmish between Jesus’ disciples and the temple police that follows. Frequently, too, Gibson slips into flashback, to provide a meager context for what is such a well known story that it needs little amplification. As Christ climbs the hill to Golgotha with his cross on his back, there are brief interludes to the Sermon on the Mount and to when Christ saves Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci) from the typical prostitute’s death by stoning, and as he is crucified, there are several shots of the Last Supper, which in addition to providing a back story also crackle with contrast: here was a man who revolutionized religion and moral standards by preaching a doctrine of selfless peace and love, who was executed in savage, inhuman fashion for the sake of political stability more than any charge of heresy.
The movie does not deal very broadly with the politics of Christ’s death, and its limited foray into the relationship between the Jewish leadership -- the high priest Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia) and the rest of the Sanhedrin -- and the Roman governor, Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov), is as conservative and literal as the Gospel texts from which the screenplay, co-written by Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald, is adapted. Pilate is depicted as an intelligent and sympathetic character, a reluctant executioner who is ultimately hamstrung by a desire to keep the peace and please Rome. In one scene that is invented for the sake of the movie (one of the few that are), he tells his wife, “If I don’t execute him, Caiaphas will start a rebellion. If I do, his followers may.” This is a popular if flawed interpretation of Pilate, but one that works well here: at times the movie seems to be an examination of mob mentality, in which the forces of reason and truth suddenly give way to lunacy and bloodlust. One of these scenes happens when a portion of the Sanhedrin initially questions Jesus, and those temple leaders who are outspoken enough to recognize that they have set up a kangaroo court to convict Christ are forcibly removed from the room. Another occurs when the Jewish crowd exhorts Pilate to execute Jesus with the familiar cry: “Crucify him!” Pilate, overwhelmed, asks his wife, “What is truth?”
The truth of The Passion is that its most indelible images are yet to come, immediately following Pilate’s decision to punish Jesus. He turns him over to his lieutenant, Abenader (Fabio Sartor), for a scourging, a violent punishment that is depicted nonstop from start to finish in one of cinema’s most nauseating, stomach-twisting scenes of human torture. If the audiences can muster up the emotion, they will find it even more heart-wrenching because while the Romans pummel Jesus in the foreground (so extensive is the torture that the two soldiers charged with scourging him are dripping with sweat when they finish) Gibson cuts frequently to shots of the crowd. There is Caiaphas, ultimately responsible for having Jesus put through the wringer, stony-faced and grim, any shred of regret buried deep within (the one missing bit of context that would’ve been helpful to non-Christian viewers is that Jesus essentially spent a lifetime humiliating Caiaphas and the temple leadership when they tried to poke holes in his sermons). There is Mary, Jesus’ mother, played by Maia Morgenstern, who is not forced to watch her son’s torture and execution but ultimately feels compelled to, and in the end, as Jesus dies, she looks into the camera as if to say, “Look what he did for you,” invoking a limited but effective tradition of addressing the camera for maximum effect. And there, behind everyone, is Satan, a genuinely disturbing and evil presence that suggests Gibson is implying a touch of the demonic in the Romans’ torture.
There are a great number of similarities between the Jesus of this movie and William Wallace, the hero of Gibson’s previous movie, Braveheart, but compared to the punishment that Jesus faces in this movie, Wallace had it easy. By the time Christ has been beaten to a bloody pulp by a company of drunken, mean-spirited Roman soldiers, forced to carry his cross up the hill, and then submit to his own crucifixion (another scene that is shot without pretense), the viewer will be tightened into a dense, frustrated knot of emotion. Crucifixion was the method of choice for capital punishment in the first century A.D., but even by that measure, Christ seems to have had it particularly bad. He sags from the cross, a limp bundle of tendons and flesh and bone, while the two thieves crucified next to him are lily-white by comparison.
Aside from spiritual motives, realism seems to have been Gibson’s primary goal in making The Passion of the Christ, more than designing the film as an argument to revisit Christianity’s and especially Catholicism’s long-documented history of anti-Semitism. It was beautifully shot by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel in Italy, a credible stand-in for first century Judea. Aside from the graphic depictions of violence and torture, the movie is, of course, filmed entirely in Aramaic and Latin, with English subtitles. At one point during the film’s production, there was a rumor that Gibson wanted to distribute the movie without subtitles, but in this finished cut he has struck the proper balance between entertainment and realism, so that in many instances his movie feels like a dramatized documentary. Needless to say, the actors have all mastered their respective tongues (Aramaic for the Jews and Latin for the Romans), and the result is an enveloping sense of period authenticity (even if the story is not). The languages also have unexpected effects. There is, for example, a neat scene in which Pilate, who has been speaking Aramaic to the Jews, takes Jesus into an anteroom for further questioning, and Jesus, to the surprise of Pilate, switches to the governor’s native Latin. It is a moment that, in the middle of a wholly subtitled movie featuring two dead languages, may be lost on most viewers, but one that crystallizes Gibson’s commitment to detail in The Passion.
As many viewers will no doubt discover, though, it may be difficult to appreciate this film on an artistic/cinematic level because it will inspire so many other modes of thought. It will, naturally, echo very strongly within Christians from a spiritual standpoint, and it may strike chords of anti-Semitism with Jewish viewers. (To say a few words on that: The origin of the belief that the Jewish people are responsible for the death of Christ comes from a too-literal interpretation of the word “Jews” in the Bible. While the Gospel writers meant it simply as the Jewish leadership, manifested most concretely in the person of Caiaphas and his cronies, some readers took it to mean the Jews as a whole, which is certainly not the case -- something the Roman Catholic Church made emphatically clear at the second Vatican Council in the 1970’s. Gibson, a Catholic who has publicly stated his preference for the pre-Vatican Council Church, commendably advances the modern position in his movie. He never once implicates the Jews as a people, even at the expense of certain scenes -- including one, drawn from the Gospel of Matthew, in which a crowd of Jews willingly accepts responsibility for the death of Jesus by saying, "His blood be on us and on our children!" -- that might’ve been perceived as gratuitously offensive.) But regardless of religion or creed, belief system or philosophy, The Passion of the Christ is an irrefutably powerful movie on spiritual, thematic, and artistic levels. If, as critics believe, it will be the most widely seen version of the Passion in history, then it is also a film that lives up to an enormous and unspoken responsibility that no director would wish upon his own work but one that Gibson, through a passion of his own, has met head-on with a job well done.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)