Red-State Deicide.
Defying Hollywood's secular, materialist mindset, Gibson has made an emotionally direct religious film that dares other Christians to confront, absorb and transcend its horrendous images of violence. It's as if Gibson is saying to Christians, "With all due respect, I'm not sure you folks really understand the physical agony Jesus endured-so I'd like to show you, if you think you're up to it." That's a galling and rather adolescent offer. But it prepares viewers for a film that could be described as holier-than-thou-a movie that's as beautiful and inventive as it is singleminded, unmodulated and (in some ways) offensive.
The Passion of the Christ is a detailed account of Christ's final 12 hours, and it is so overpoweringly bloody that it dares even genteel Christian moviegoers to test themselves against it. As shot by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Patriot, The Black Stallion) in grimy daubs of light and shadow that suggest aged oil paint, scripted by Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald (Wise Blood) in Aramaic and Latin, it is a work of hallucinatory fervor. It is also a work of deep moral certainty-more so than Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, a challenging, fitfully brilliant film that nevertheless seemed fueled not by piety, but by a intellectual Catholic's deep-seated fear that he did not believe enough.
Jesus (James Caviezel) is granted an appropriately striking entrance in the Garden of Olives at night, where he has gone to pray following the Last Supper. Deschanel's camera locates Jesus in the indigo darkness, his back to the camera, his body nearly silhouetted as he mutters to himself like an afflicted soothsayer. Jesus resists temptation by Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) and consults with his followers; these scenes are crosscut with images of Judas Iscariot (a sharp, morally distressed performance by Luca Lionello) betraying Jesus to the Pharisees.
Singled out for persecution by the high priest Caiphas (Mattia Sbragia), who considers Jesus a threat to his own political influence, the Son of God is hauled before Pontius Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov), the Roman governor of this occupied province. Pilate still doesn't think Jesus' alleged sins deserve the death penalty, or even especially harsh punishment. He passes the buck by sending Jesus to Herod for condemnation. Herod refuses to condemn him and returns him to Pilate. The insatiable Caiphas demands that Jesus be executed. Cowed, Pilate instead orders Jesus scourged.
The Roman soldiers who do the deed have thick necks, broad backs, wicked eyes and snaggly yellow teeth; they look like editorial cartoons of soccer hooligans. While Jesus' mother (Maia Morgenstern) and Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci) look on in helpless horror, the Romans beat the Messiah's flesh with canes and strip it with cat-o-nine-tails. Gibson depicts this mayhem with a pitiless thoroughness that could be described, paradoxically, as "Old Testament." After Jesus' bloodied body is dragged off to a dungeon, a few cackling, goonish soldiers fit him with a crown of thorns, then pound it into his head until it sticks.
Coincidentally, this happens to be Gibson's artistic approach to Jesus' suffering. He wants to produce images of pain so graphic, intense and unrelenting that they obliterate euphemisms. And despite the tradition of graphic movie violence represented by the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah and Scorsese, Gibson succeeds to a degree one might not have thought possible. It's like the rape scene in Gaspar Noe's poseur shockfest Irreversible stretched out to feature length-with Jesus instead of Monica Bellucci as the victim, a religious mission that simultaneously ennobles the brutality, and a far more sophisticated filmmaking technique (at once self-conscious and invisible).
The scourging scene is astoundingly bloody, but it's just a warm-up to the big finish. Viewers expect the director of Braveheart to stage a deicide that trumps all deicides, and Gibson does not disappoint. From Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings through Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (an acknowledged inspiration for Scorsese), the crucifixion has always been a voyage into pain, but Gibson's blunt emotions and subjective filmmaking techniques up the ante. He wants us to feel as though we're being crucified-and he gets his wish. Jesus carries the cross after having been chained, beaten, scourged and subjected to a forced march. No matter how tired he is, whenever he falls down, he gets right back up. He endures pain so that he can endure more pain. And mind you, this Jesus doesn't just carry his own cross; he carries the biggest, heaviest-looking cross in movie history. (When he falls and the cross hits the ground, it goes "boom," like God's own footstep.)
This is a significant distinction that separates Gibson's Christ from all other movie Christs. This Son of God is the manliest Jesus in movie history-the Messiah as envisioned by an Oscar-winning action hero who specializes in withstanding punishment and then coming back to kill his punishers. (One can almost picture a five-year-old Gibson staring up at a crucifix on the wall of his dad's study and wondering, "If Jesus was the Son of God, why didn't he climb down off the cross and kick ass?" Gibson's whole career as an action hero might be considered a surreal response to that question.)
Even though the Messiah's sentiments are loving and nonviolent, his demeanor is tough, even Spartan. From the opening sequence, where Jesus crushes Satan's serpent emissary with a sandaled foot, to the revolting climactic image of Christ's crucified carcass being torn open piñata-style by a Roman soldier's spear, the implication is that Jesus is a pacifist not by nature or by destiny, but by choice.
Throughout The Passion, Gibson and Deschanel employ two formal devices, also on display in the current Afghan masterpiece Osama. One is the roving, subjective camera, which either places us in Jesus' perspective or else floats through the biblical world until it locates Jesus (seek and ye shall find). A second, related device is the visual equivalent of direct address-having characters seem to look right into the camera, into the eyes of the viewer. Jesus seems to look right at us as he preaches love, tolerance and nonviolence in the face of overpowering hatred and savagery. He seems to look right at us as he's shackled, taunted, beaten, whipped and crucified. Jesus' preaching and his suffering are intercut with mirror image P.O.V. shots, wherein spectators listen to Jesus' words or tormentors abuse him; both respond to Jesus by responding to the camera that represents Jesus. This sophisticated and powerful filmmaking technique pierces the fourth wall without tearing it down, and forces us to identify alternately with Jesus and his tormentors.
These techniques, mind you, are not new. They been used by many notable filmmakers including Kubrick, Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and Jonathan Demme. But their appearance in a story set during biblical times is noteworthy, because it certifies that Gibson isn't out to remake The Greatest Story Ever Told. He's not just telling another Bible tale. He's preaching-and his decision to use provocative, even jarring modernist techniques implies that it is not a polite sermon that would please upper-middle-class, American, suburban Protestants. It's blunt, aggressive, even confrontational-a working-class Roman Catholic or hellfire-and-damnation Baptist approach. Visually, Gibson employs street-preacher tactics, refusing to let a potential audience member get away, but instead following him down the block and peppering him with increasingly provocative rhetorical questions until he gets a reaction. He's doing whatever he has to do to make this story personal.
For Jews, this story is personal indeed. For the past year, Gibson has been dogged by charges of anti-Semitism. The accusations were lodged by critics (some Jewish, some not) who were rightly suspicious of Gibson's right-wing Catholic views, his nutjob dad's Holocaust denials and his decision to screen the movie in advance only for people who were already inclined to like it. Gibson's detractors feared that The Passion might re-ignite the old "blood libel" charges at a time when anti-Jewish sentiment is enjoying a worldwide resurgence.
I wish I could say these fears were unfounded and that Gibson was guilty of nothing but stupid tactics to publicize his project. Unfortunately, The Passion is a catalog of errors in judgment that could be explained away individually if they'd happened in a vacuum, but which cumulatively suggest that Gibson is either a bigot or so oblivious that he might as well be one.
One could argue, for instance, that shooting The Passion in Rome might have forced Gibson to cast the Pharisees with Italian actors who had dark, kinky hair and prominent noses. After all, if the career of John Turturro has taught us anything, it's that Italian and Jewish actors are ethnically interchangeable. But this visual error is compounded by the script's making Caiphas into Jesus' antagonist-a sop to the teen-pandering rules of action cinema, one that's probably etched into Gibson's DNA. Whenever Jesus endures some new agony, Gibson cuts to Caiphas, who isn't twirling his mustache but might as well be.
Gibson cooks his own political goose further by failing to have the Jews react to Christ's suffering with the same complexity as the Romans. Where the Romans are permitted a whole range of reactions-from the goonish guards' chortling sadism to Pilate's spinelessness to the appalled reaction of a young centurion who watches the scourging with tears in his eyes-the Jews seem more united. With the exception of a few priests who turn away in disgust at Jesus' scourging-and, of course, Jesus' mother, friends and disciples-the Jews are depicted as nearly monolothic in their disdain for Christ and their enjoyment of his suffering.
Gibson will certainly argue that anti-Semitism is in the mind of the beholder-that it's lunacy to suggest that just because a few Jews gave up Christ to the Romans, then it logically follows that all Jews are collectively responsible for Christ's death. Such an argument would make about as much sense as insisting that African-Americans bear collective responsibility for the murder of Malcolm X, or that Muslims should collectively be blamed for 9/11.
But images have a way of making their own argument, and whatever Gibson's intentions, The Passion is a powderkeg of anti-Semitic imagery. Gibson insists that all humankind was responsible for Jesus' death, but the movie implies that some humans were more responsible than others. ("It is he who delivered me to you who has the greater sin," Jesus tells Pilate; if the words of Jesus don't represent the director's viewpoint, I don't know what does.) I hope the film's juxtaposition of dusky-skinned, hook-nosed Pharisees and images of a bloodied Jesus nailed up on a cross won't make bigots feel validated, much less empowered. If the worst happens, Gibson shouldn't be held personally responsible, any more than Martin Scorsese should be held personally responsible for presidential assassin John Hinckley's Taxi Driver obsession. That said, it's always preferable to be on the side of the angels. Accidentally or on purpose, Gibson makes you wonder what side he's on.
One thing's for sure: Gibson won't rest until he's reclaimed Jesus from wimpdom, and this movie goes further in that direction than any Christ story I can recall.
His and Caviezel's version of the Messiah reminded me of a painting of Christ that hung on the wall of a youth group classroom in a Dallas church I attended as a teenager. Painted in the early 1980s, a generation after Jesus Christ Superstar, this Jesus was broad-shouldered and smiling like he had a secret. It was the face not of a delicate preacher, but a hippie with strong hands who knew how to build furniture and then give a sexy hippie chick a backrub. Gibson's Jesus is cut from the same sackcloth. He's in tune with the Jesus-related merchandise that captured the imaginations of young American Christians in the 1980s and early 1990s-for example, the t-shirt that depicts Christ hoisting a cross on his back like a weightlifter, accompanied by the phrases, "His pain, your gain" and "Bench press this."
Like those images, Gibson's approach signals his awareness that in secular, materialist, sex-and-violence-steeped America, the story of a chaste pacifist is a tough sell. To make Jesus attractive to the young generation, as Gibson plainly aims to do, one must first find ways of making him seem macho. That's what Gibson does here, by serving up a Jesus who withstands everything life can throw at him. It's an Old Testament reworking of the New Testament, starring a stoic whose ability to withstand lethal violence suggests not Christ, but Rasputin.
This Gibsonesque interpretation of the Gospel is tailor-made for post-9/11 America, where a popular culture laced with messages of moral relativism and tolerance coexists alongside law enforcement and military policies built upon crude, adolescent notions of righteous payback and pre-emptive force. Gibson's macho Jesus-a red-state Jesus-also mirrors the current backlash against gay rights. It's sadly predictable that Gibson, whose career as actor, director and public figure is full of homophobic sentiment, would find room for similar slurs in The Passion. For no apparent reason, the film depicts King Herod as a bewigged, Dom DeLuise-style fop lording over a court full of decadent queens. Gibson also casts the role of Satan with an actress, shaves her eyebrows, masks her in albino-white face paint, dresses her in a black hooded gown and hires a man to dub her voice. The implied opposition could not be more obvious: Goodness is exemplified by Jesus-a macho man who chose not to kick ass; a stud who chose not to have sex with Mary Magdalene-while evil is represented by a creature of indeterminate gender.
That image sounds bizarre because it is bizarre. Yet it's consistent with the vital strangeness that burns within The Passion of the Christ. All things considered, it is preferable to have movies that make you feel something (even anger or nausea) than movies that make you feel nothing in particular. It is impossible to watch this movie and feel nothing. Like a less-talented descendant of Sam Peckinpah, Gibson has the tendency to get lost in a testosterone fog. He shares with Peckinpah the assumptive fallacy that because he personally believes that violent urges drive every important choice in life, it must therefore be true, and anyone who denies it is being dishonest. But like Peckinpah, Gibson has an eye, plus guts. He makes you look at things you'd rather not look at, and feel things you'd rather not feel. He's a brute and a poet, and The Passion is the most controversial movie of recent times because it deserves to be.
However one chooses to praise or condemn this film, one should first concede that it did not come from a corporate memo; it sprang from one filmmaker's lifelong personal obsession, and from a schizoid Western culture that shaped the filmmaker's personality. If there is such a thing as collective responsibility, perhaps America and her film industry bear it for having helped produce Mel Gibson and all that he represents. God help us.