THE LASHING OF THE CHRIST
by Ed Owens

For the past week (at least), the country has been consumed by talk of Mel Gibson's ode to divine suffering, The Passion of the Christ. From the news reports featuring interviews of tearful patrons leaving the theater to theological debates on the film's central premise, the hype surrounding the film has been inescapable. That makes any plot summary thankfully unnecessary, but it certainly complicates the task of reviewing the movie, given that much of what one takes away from the film will depend on what one brought into it. In the final analysis, the question of whether or not the film is any good depends on two separate analyses, one of the film's technical merits and another of its intended purpose. The former is a fairly easy assessment, while the latter is much more difficult.

Let's be totally honest: as a film, The Passion isn't very good. It is so single-minded in its narrative focus that traditional notions of story and development are all but ignored. With the exception of Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov), the characters have little to nothing in the way of nuance or development, and that includes the central figure of Christ himself. Some show this flaw less than others -- Maia Morgenstern adds a much needed emotional heft in her scenes as Christ's mother Mary -- but the overall effect is less one of watching characters develop and grow than of watching them go through their paces.

Jim Caviezel (pronounce like "the weasel") has been getting much praise for his turn as the titular Messiah, but his delivery is frequently stilted and halting, and the majority of his time is spent looking pained, a not-too-difficult feat considering the eight hours of makeup he had to undergo practically on a daily basis. The inclusion of a demonic figure resembling Robert Blake's video voyeur from Lost Highway is both laughable and further troubling given the unintentional resonance --Gibson has put us in the same voyeuristic position.

Some would fault the source material for this lack of nuance, but even Gibson acknowledges at least the existence of a more resonant context by including a series of throwaway flashbacks. I say throwaway because their inclusion feels like an afterthought, the result of a series of reshoots deemed necessary after early prints were found to be far too draining. When the film cuts from the bloodied and beaten Christ to his Sermon on the Mount, the pronouncement that one should love thine enemy feels ultimately hollow given the fact that the film seems more content to tell rather than show. And it is this fact, The Passion's narrow-minded, decontextualized approach to its material, that ultimately leads to the film's undoing, as well as to my disappointment in the failed fulfillment of its own promise.

Gibson trots out every device available to him, from the slow-mo/fast-mo tempo changes that depict Christ's arrest, a style adopted from and better suited to the Hong Kong action genre, to the cant angles and extreme close-ups that document every wound inflicted, every fall taken, every drop of blood spilled. Yet it is in this stylization that Gibson, at least partially, loses his way. Without meaning to, at least if one is to take Gibson at face value, the film fetishizes Christ's suffering, becoming a religious Grand Guignol that totters dangerously on the brink of pornography for the religious right. Consciously or not, Gibson and his congregation, while outwardly cringing at the sight of Christ's copiously spilled blood, inwardly revel and rejoice in it, presuming that since it is by Christ's blood we are saved, the quantity of blood must somehow determine the level of our salvation.

The question that kept occurring to me throughout the film was why exactly I needed to see the suffering depicted with such horrifying excess. I understand the argument that an awareness of Christ's suffering is necessary to an appreciation of the atonement, but to see it played out in such excruciating detail is unnecessary and, on some level, indefensible. The film relentlessly pummels its audience with Kubrickian images of the most horrific ultraviolence without pausing to contemplate the larger context, the universal question of why it matters. A thirty second epilogue depicting the resurrection, no matter how graceful, hardly balances out the 2+ hours of sadism and torture. Other than that closing shot, the film offers little breathing room for viewers to fill in the context themselves, so relentless is the violence portrayed. The tagline associated with the film best sums up what I see as the central problem: "He was born in order to die." True, but irrelevant -- what matters is that he died in order that we might be born.

Since even before its release, given the number of advance screenings available to church groups, I've been besieged by people telling me that Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is inspiring, touching, and profoundly moving. On the contrary, I found it vicious, ugly, and teetering on sadistic. As I sat watching the brutality, I kept wondering what Christ himself would think of Gibson's film, or, to use the popular Christian phrase: what would Jesus do? Regardless of his intent, Gibson can't see the forest for the trees, and the film is so narrowly focused on the savagery of Christ's suffering that it ultimately loses sight of his humanity.

©2004 Ed Owens
CineScene