A Passionate Review of “The Christ”

By: Chris Hewitt, Knight Ridder Newspapers, (KRT)
Posted In: Opinion

Powerful and upsetting, “The Passion of the Christ” is a movie about a Jesus who is, quite literally, dying to get up on that cross.

Focusing on the idea that Jesus was eager to fulfill his destiny and to do what was needed to save his people, Mel Gibson’s bluntly effective movie has to be the most single-minded cinematic version of the final hours of Christ ever.

That’s why the film moves so swiftly. That’s why it is so specifically focused on Jesus’ torture (the Resurrection scene is painfully brief, as if Gibson doesn’t want to give us relief from the two hours of agony that precede it). That’s why Jesus looks almost victorious in his final moments. And that’s why the film is so relentlessly violent.

It’s the Bloodiest Story Ever Told, with the brutality beginning long before the Crucifixion and not ending until well after the final nail is hammered into the cross. It is possibly the most gruesome movie I’ve ever seen, and my opinion on the violence vacillated as I watched it.

On the one hand, Gibson’s prolonged scenes of torture tip over into sadism not on the part of the torturers but of the director. On the other hand, I appreciated the horrifying degree to which Gibson pushes the carnage, since his point is to make the level of violence come as close as possible to matching the level of sacrifice the movie’s Jesus attains. This Christ movie is not about his relationship with his disciples or the tenor of the times but about the enormity of his physical sacrifice. And it’s worth pointing out that, here, “passion” means “suffering.”

The movie does not spend time with the loving, gentle parts of the Christ story, which are seen in short flashbacks. The implication is that we are being shown how painful and almost unendurable the suffering was as a reminder of how much compassion and love it represented.

This point hits home movingly when Jesus is being nailed to the cross and Jim Caviezel, as Jesus, chokes out the line, “Father, forgive them.” It is a great scene filmed, like the entire movie, in gorgeous widescreen and almost everything that comes before it leads directly to that moment.

I say “almost” because Gibson is still the gifted, but occasionally crude, filmmaker who expected us to cheer the murder of a character in “Braveheart” simply because he was gay. “Passion” doesn’t do anything that dopey, but Gibson delights in lingering over the way Jesus’ torturers cackle and smack their spitty lips while they carve away his flesh. These scenes would be so much more interesting if Gibson spent time delving into what could make humans behave so inhumanely rather than simply depicting them as monsters.

As to charges of anti-Semitism, “Passion” didn’t strike me as overtly anti-Semitic, although it offers plenty of fuel for the prejudices hateful people might already possess. I also think that’s beside the point. You could scan the faces and clothes of Jesus’ accusers to find “Semitic” features, I suppose, but you’d be missing the movie’s assertion that all of the people in this story are, in an odd way, playing their parts in sending Jesus to the destiny he longs to fulfill.

In the scenes where Jesus is being hurried to his fate, I forgot to look for the differences between the people who accused him because all of them seemed alike to me: human, struggling and flawed.

Despite Gibson’s assertion that “Passion” is scrupulously faithful, a great deal of choice is involved in the way this director organizes and selects his material. And there is a lot of room for interpretation, so everyone is bound to have a deeply personal reaction to the film.

But those reactions need not correspond to Gibson’s own (Catholic, ultra-traditional) view of the story. What I took away was the enormity of the empathy in the people _ the disciples, the bystanders, Jesus’ mother _ who watch Christ’s suffering.

More than anything, the pain and confusion in those faces struck me as a metaphoric plea for belief, regardless of what it is that you believe in. Whether it’s the Talmud, Jesus, the Koran or the beating heart of the person who wakes up next to you in the morning, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we need that belief to survive.