I went into Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ expecting an experience similar to that of watching Schindler’s List: it would be hard to watch, but worthwhile to make the effort of doing so. It’s now about an hour since I left the theater, and I think that my expectation was accurate.
Discussion and spoilers follow. Over the last few days I’ve read a lot of the commentary that has sprung up around this film, so I was well aware of much (if not all) of its specifically violent content and wasn’t taken by surprise by any of the on-screen brutality. Make no mistake- The Passion doesn’t pull any punches, and it starts throwing them very early on. Now I’ve seen some violent movies, but their violence — certainly Quentin Tarantino’s brand of violence — is generally meaningless spectacle. Whether or not you classify The Passion’s violence in the same way depends greatly on what you believe about Jesus Christ. Most of the numerous negative reviews that I have come across can’t get past the blood and guts, and see it as so much meaningless, bloody spectacle. The positive reviews, on the other hand, find meaning on the other side of the violence, and that meaning is attached to Jesus Christ as incarnate God, taking on the sins of the whole world in exchange for our salvation.
This is not to say that anyone who is unable to stomach the film’s violence is therefore unable to properly accept Christ’s sacrifice. The Passion is definitely not for everyone, and it is rated R for a reason. (Roger Ebert went as far as saying that this movie could be taken as evidence that the MPAA will never give a NC-17 rating for mere violence.) Jesus gets pushed off a bridge, and his fall is abruptly halted by his chains; he is tied to a post and scourged, and we see the whips ripping the flesh off his body to the extent that his ribs are exposed; we see the nails punched through his hands and feet, and we see the spear rammed into his side.
That said, I didn’t find the violence excessive. It was explicit in that Gibson obviously wanted to give his audience a sense of what Jesus actually went through, and I think that anyone who watches this movie will be disabused forever of the image of a bloodless Jesus on a sterile cross. Having made the point that the flesh was being literally ripped off Jesus’ back, however, Gibson tended from then on to look at what else was going on at the time, be it the soldiers standing around, or the reactions of Mary and Magdalene.
The violence is the hard part. What makes the film worth the effort of watching it? In and of itself, The Passion is pretty decent cinema. Mel Gibson did a magnificent job of believably recreating the “rotten outpost” of Roman Judea, and with only a few exceptions, got the details right all the way down to the bad teeth (Barabbas is a fine example). As a director, he might have overused slow motion as a means of indicating to the audience that This Bit Is Symbolic, and at times the general styling of a shot reminded me of Braveheart, but that’s not really a bad thing. Cinematically, I would give The Passion 4 out of 5.
Much of the criticism towards The Passion is directed at the lack of time given to depicting Jesus’ ministry. The problem with this kind of criticism is that The Passion is not about Jesus’ ministry. It sets out to document Jesus’ Passion, or suffering, and it only flashes back to snippets of Jesus’ ministry in order to contrast with the ongoing action. In the scope of the whole life and teaching of Christ, the Passion is just the second-to-last chapter, and it is this chapter that Mel Gibson has concentrated on.
The other positive aspect that I want to focus on is the treatment of the characters. The Gospel narrative is not very long on individual characterization, and it is up to the reader to imagine how the people around Jesus might have behaved. How a director interprets the characters in his source material is something that I usually find very interesting in movies where I am familiar with the existing literature, and The Passion is no exception. Given Gibson’s Catholicism, it’s not surprising that Mary plays a key role. Accompanied by Magdelene, she follows Jesus from his trial, to the whipping post, along the road through Jerusalem and out to Golgotha. The occasional flashback to happier days paints a poignant picture of a mother who can almost feel the whip in her own flesh.
Pilate is portrayed as a man caught between a rock and hard place. He is not convinced that Jesus is guilty of anything that demands his execution, and unwilling to throw him to the crowd. However, he is concerned that if he does not, the crowd will riot, but if he does, Jesus’ followers will riot. Pilate is also under pressure from Rome to keep things under control; if there are any more uprisings, then the spilled blood will be his. While the historical Pilate was less genteel than the Pilate here, I think The Passion nicely captures his utter inability to grasp what Jesus was about. As a foil, the film fleshed out his wife Claudia, who also recognized Jesus’ innocence, and who was distressed at her inability to prevent her husband from eventually bowing to the crowd.
For me, the most interesting character was Judas Iscariot. I always pictured Judas as an inherently evil character- the bad guy who managed to hide his rottenness from the other disciples, and who Jesus kept around because He loved him despite what he would eventually do. The Passion gives Judas a much more sympathetic portrayal; he is a tragic man who, having lived his life with himself in mind, takes the Sanhedrin up on its offer for cold, hard cash in exchange for the whereabouts of one man. Too late, Judas realises everything that Jesus is and the enormity of what he has done. Tormented by the demons who only now make themselves known to him, Judas ties a rope to a convenient tree.
There is obviously plenty more to be said about The Passion of the Christ, but this is all I want to say for now. Given an appropriate caveat about the violence, I recommend this film to anyone who is on the sunny side of skeptical about the claims of Jesus Christ. It’s probably a hit or miss proposition if you don’t think he was anything more than a good teacher who died.
In my dream I was drowning my sorrows But my sorrows, they learned to swim Surrounding me, going down on me Spilling over the brim Waves of regret and waves of joy I reached out for the one I tried to destroy You…you said you’d wait ’til the end of the world
Good summary, Andrew. You’ve made me reconsider whether to see it or not.
“The Passion of C”
That is what the title of The Passion of the Christ is shortend to on my movie ticket stub. I explained to those who asked about it that the theater had to choose between that and “The P of Christ.”…