...the director spends so much time recounting in minute and realistic detail the agony of Christ that he neglects the stronger message, the spiritual message, of love and kindness.
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The Movie According to John:
It used to be that politics and religion could be counted on to start an argument, anywhere, anytime. More recently, movies have supplanted politics and religion to a good degree in this department, perhaps because many people have given up on politicians, abandoned churches, and taken up movies as a new creed. In any case, it's no wonder that the combination of politics, religion, and movies produced two of the most controversial films of 2004, "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "The Passion of the Christ."
To be sure the reader gets a well-rounded look at Mel Gibson's elegiac story of the last hours of Christ, we include two perspectives, my own and my associate Eddie Feng's. It should be noted that we come to the subject from very differing views about God and religion, yet we are both looking at the merits of the movie here, not the worth or the shortcomings of people's personal beliefs.
I say this because the movie seems to have engendered any number of reactions from people based largely on their predisposition to the subject matter. People who had never seen the movie argued its worth, depending on their own religious persuasions. If, for example, you liked the film, you were a loyal Christian; if you didn't like the film, you were an atheist. To make matters worse, some people argued that the film was anti-Semitic because it refers to Jews who failed to support Christ in His last hours, while other people praised it for its historical accuracy. I should hope we could approach this subject in a more reasoned manner.
Before I had a chance to see "The Passion of the Christ" for myself, I heard about it at school from a student teacher. In fact, I got two perspectives because he had seen it with his girlfriend, and they had opposing views on the subject. He said he was a quite dedicated Christian but found the movie too violently brutal to watch. He told me he wanted to leave about halfway through, since by then he had gotten the point and didn't see any letup in the severity of Christ's suffering, a suffering he didn't feel he needed to endure. His girlfriend, however, also a dedicated Christian, insisted they stay, saying she was inspired by the suffering that she saw Christ accept as the Savior of Mankind.
Directed by Mel Gibson and starring James Caviezel, "The Passion of the Christ" recounts the last hours of Christ's life on Earth. It covers His betrayal and arrest in Gethsemane; His trial before the leaders of the Hebrew Pharisees and then before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate; His suffering; His death on the cross; and an intimation of His resurrection. For Christians, these are the literal and symbolic representations of Christ's final gift to Mankind. For those who believe, He died to pay for the sins of all humanity, enabling every person to repent, be forgiven, and live in everlasting harmony with God. For me, however, as strong a believer in Christ and His message as I am, the film occasioned mixed reactions, just as I suppose it did with audiences everywhere. For me, Gibson overemphasized the agony of Christ, glossed over the resurrection, and only in bits and pieces of brief flashback referred to any of Christ's message of love to the world. Instead of being inspired or uplifted by God's Word, I felt rather depressed by the time the movie was over. Somehow, I don't think that was the point of Christ's coming to Earth, the goal of His teaching, preaching, and dying.
Clearly, Gibson's movie is meant to be a latter-day Passion play, one of those medieval religious dramas that dealt with Christ's afflictions and were presented to the people of Europe as a substitute for their reading of the Bible for themselves, since most of the populace at that time were illiterate. The Passion plays were intended to be entertaining and instructional and not least of all frightening in order to help the masses better understand the Church and conform to its teachings. It is understandable that the accent in the Passion plays was on the most dramatic and temporal elements of Christ's life, understandable if one considers the importance of the plays to the everyday, uneducated Christians of the Middle Ages.
The "Passion" of the plays referred to Christ's suffering on the cross as recorded in the Gospels of the New Testament, "passion" derived from the Latin word "passus," meaning to suffer or submit. Gibson appears to have taken this meaning just as literally as the medieval performers in the Passion plays, presenting in his movie a view of Christ's life that almost forgets the Savior's plea for peace and love amongst all people. The stress in early Christianity on simple belief and salvation, sometimes at the expense of living a Christlike life, may explain why in the history of the Christian religion its members have been no more prone toward peace and love than the members of any other religious community. Need I remind the reader of the injustices done in the name of Christianity--the multiple Crusades, the Inquisitions, the systematic slaughter of the Native American population by early Christian explorers, settlers, and plunderers; and, as with many other religions, the relentless insistence upon imposing its own values upon all peoples at the cost of human lives?
I had always thought of Christ's final agonies as being as much mental as physical, the thought that His own people, including His disciples, had turned on Him inflicting as much distress as the pain, exhaustion, shock, and ultimate asphyxiation of the crucifixion. His most trusted follower, Peter, denied knowing Jesus three times out of fear for his own life. Yet Gibson's movie emphasizes mainly Christ's bodily torments. One example: In the King James translation of the Holy Bible, the apostles Matthew, Mark, and Luke mention in one sentence each that Christ was scourged before being crucified. In Matthew 26:27, we read of the Roman governor Pilate's punishment for Jesus: "...and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified." That's it. And today the word "scourge" can signify not only "to whip with a scourge or lash" but "to chastise or criticize severely" ("Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary"). Yet Gibson develops an entire extended scene around the scourging of Jesus wherein He is beaten by two Roman soldiers with a variety of whips, reeds, and flails until His body is ripped to shreds from head to toe and left a bloody, pulpy, red, weltering mass. I mean, where did that come from? Well, apparently it came from a description of Christ's scourging by an eighteenth-century Catholic mystic, Sister Ann Catherine Emmerich, in her book "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ." Is this fair? The scourging is a mere one-word hint in the Bible. While it is true that the Romans believed in inflicting harsh punishments on their subjects to keep them in line, the severity of the scourging of Christ as rendered in the movie seems pure conjecture, based simply on the word of a nun's psychic "vision." If a person were cynical, that person might say Gibson's movie was pure sensationalism, pure exploitation. As a movie critic, I'll just say it's pure Hollywood filmmaking (even if it was produced entirely in Italy). It is Gibson making the movie Gibson wanted to make. It may be a legitimate interpretation of Christ's life, but it may not be Biblically or historically accurate.
Perhaps despite our educational, scientific, and technological advances, we are no more sophisticated today than our ancestors of a thousand years ago. We still enjoy the ruder, cruder, baser things in life as much as or more than we enjoy the sublime. Just as the Passion plays of yore appealed to the secular aspects of Christ's suffering, so does "The Passion of the Christ" appeal to our desire to be entertained by the less-noble side of human behavior. In short, I was disappointed in Gibson's treatment of the topic. Ironically, the director spends so much time recounting in minute and realistic detail the agony of Christ that he neglects the stronger message, the spiritual message, of love and kindness that everyone should express throughout one's life if the hope of salvation is to be found that Christ's suffering enabled.
In fact, I wondered when it was over just what Gibson's point had been in making the film. I assumed before I saw it and continue to assume afterwards that it was an honest attempt to show how much Jesus loved all Mankind through His ultimate suffering and death. If so, however, then why play coy with the ending and not show Christ's resurrection in its fullest, rather than give us the merest glimpse of the resurrected Man? Was Gibson trying to have it both ways? Was he attempting to show to true believers that Jesus was the Son of God and to nonbelievers that he may have been a mere mortal all along? Or did Gibson believe that after the many excesses he had already shown on screen, he would go for subtlety at the end? Now, don't get me wrong; I liked the nuance of the ending. I wish the whole picture had been as refined. But more people get their historical information from the movies than from books, and more people will learn about Christ from this movie than from their nonreading of the New Testament. So, why not make the movie at least Biblically correct?
Put it another way: I can understand Gibson's dedication to his Christian convictions and the earnestness of his intention in conveying these convictions to his audience. But I can also understand his desire to sell a motion picture and entertain a public. By the 1500's, many of the old Passion plays had degenerated into crude amusements that the Church finally denounced. I cannot fully support a movie today that appears to have gotten itself caught up in a similar pitfall. "The Passion of the Christ" may be an admirable production in terms of its fine acting and high production values, but this doesn't necessarily make it an enjoyable, enlightening, inspirational, or uplifting experience for everyone.
Still and all, I may be dwelling unduly on the negative. There is also much to admire in "The Passion of the Christ." There is, for instance, James Caviezel's portrayal of Jesus. The actor may be a tad too movie-star handsome to fit perfectly my ideal of the role, but he does bear a passing resemblance to the image on the Shroud of Turin and to many famous paintings of the Christ. Caviezel certainly communicates the Christian Savior's compassion, humanity, and ultimate distress. Moreover, there is the poignant portrayal of Jesus' mother, Mary, by Romanian actress Maia Morgenstern. She, perhaps more than any other person or event in the film, communicates the real agony and passion of the story, the supreme love of a mother for her dying child, which in turn can be seen as the love of the Christ for His children of all the world.
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