Directed by Mel Gibson

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.