(Testing) The Passion of the Viewer

I finally got around to watching The Passion of the Christ over the weekend. It has taken me a couple of days to sort out my opinions about the movie, but I think I’ve finally reached a consensus.

The movie failed.

Let me explain.

I knew what watching The Passion was going to bring. I know the story like I know the ABCs. I knew about the controversy surrounding the supposed anti-semetic depiction of the Jewish players in the tale. I was aware of the hype with the all-subtitled dialogue and the brutal depictions of Jesus’ crucifixion. I knew going in what the movie was like, but what I didn’t know was what it was about.

One might expect a movie about Jesus made by a devout believer to be, ultimately, about His message and the hope He represents. Perhaps that’s what Mel Gibson intended. I honestly hope that’s what he intended, because what he actually made was a period horror film.

Let me explain.

Imagine you took the whole Biblical angle out of the equation (it is difficult, but try). Taking this movie at face value with no preconceptions about what it means or what it is trying to say and you have the following: A story full of torture, suicide, betrayal, death and peppered with frightening images of an androgynous specter who tormets the main character before finally being defeated in a symbolic way and in the twist ending, the tortured hero returns to life. Devoid of the historical context, the movie played out like a sort of noir setpiece with spiritual overtones (not unlike The Omen perhaps) and ferocious, unrelenting violence. The inclusion of Satan and the lingering sideplot involving Judas complete with frightening hallucinations and ending in graphic suicide only punctuated how grim this movie made the subject.

The excesses of violence are not what made me dislike the movie. What made me dislike it was that the violence upstaged the good parts of the movie: The flashbacks. Jim Caveziel played a pretty terrific Jesus when he got the chance to utter a few more actual lines besides “Ugh!” and “Auugh!” The scenes of Jesus saving Mary Magdalene and the Last Supper were actually really well done and effective at showing a Jesus that was not just some somber sage spouting cryptic wisdom but made him human and supplied a charisma that you could actually imagine people dropping their lives to follow. The scene of Jesus as a youngish carpenter talking to his mother, Mary, was especially effective at making Jesus seem human without taking away the sense of divinity. Had the whole movie focused on that and then also just included a couple of intense segments of the crucixion the movie would have been twenty times better. Fifty.

Instead Gibson focuses lovingly on Jesus’ flesh getting ripped from His body. He lingers on the placement of the crown of thorns and practically delights in showing Him stumble trying to carry the cross (which is inexplicably constructed differently than the crosses borne by the two criminals crucified on either side of him) again and again and again.

The most effective scene in the whole movie by far was the forgiveness Jesus grants to the repentant criminal while they both hang on their crosses. Again the depiction of the humanity of Jesus and the explicit example of how He offered hope where there probably should have been none worked marvelously. But the moment is fleeting and soon enough we’re back to self-congratulatory shots of the make-up team’s work until a sense of hope is replaced entirely by a sense of revulsion.

The difficult thing is that I know it is important that Jesus not just died but suffered and died. That’s one of the key tenants here is that the only perfect man chose to be brutalized in such a way for our sake. It has to be pointless and harsh and it should fill any person with shame to witness. But the problem is that importance is something separate from the point. The point isn’t that He was tortured, the point is that He did it for a purpose. It is the purpose, the message, that is lost in the translation to this film. With the reason for the events glossed over or assumed here except in a few fleeting and infrequent moments that don’t amount to enough, what is left is a picture that cares as much about the implements used to inflict the suffering as the cause for the suffering. And that’s pure horror movie territory.

As an uplifting telling of Jesus final hours: One star. As a technically sound terror-flick: Three stars. Net rating: Two out of five stars.

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