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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 7, 2004
Just a movie
There was more to say about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and I've now had a chance to digest the movie. I don't write as a reviewer for what interests me is not the movie itself but its apparent size as a political social and religious phenomenon. The thing has outsold Lord of the Rings in its opening days -- by coincidence another cinematic spectacular built on Catholic Christian premises though rather more subtly. For many many people the movie has been a traumatic encounter with the reality of Christ's Crucifixion. It was intended to provide that and I don' t think Mr. Gibson's motives were cynical. He believes in what he has presented and if he happened to employ some commercial savvy in peddling it the more power to him. To my mind the movie merits two viewings if only to give the viewer a chance to overcome in the second the full power of the violence in the first. The scourging scene for instance goes on and on: at first view it seems unendurably horrible; at second merely overdone. The comparison many critics have made to a mediaeval passion play is misleading: no such play could ever have been like this. Mr. Gibson's movie more resembles a grisly north German late mediaeval altarpiece. It is a visual work in panels. While it may be sold as an exact Catholic reproduction of the Passion from the Gospels it can't be because there are subtle differences of emphasis and of remembered detail between the four Gospels. To which Mr. Gibson adds innumerable small extra-Biblical features only several of which were drawn from the visions of later Catholic mystics. In twenty years this Passion according to Gibson will seem like a period piece from our decade. It will probably continue to have a vogue however as a very memorable period piece. The flashbacks are lame and the figure of Jesus in them is presented in happyface. The mob scenes are clich?d. The lighting is often lurid. The opening Gethsemane scene is too obviously sound-staged. The reconstruction of ancient Jerusalem is full of exaggeration: it was a city on a hill not on a mountain. The figure of Satan is tacky: making him androgynous or transsexual was a clever idea but could have been so much better done. There are several bad overstated performances though creditable interpretations of Mother Mary Pontius Pilate and perhaps Simon of Cyrene. Even when well done such pregnant lines as Pilate's "Quid est veritas?" are reduced to post-modern irony. ("What is truth? Tell me about it! I'll tell you what MY truth is.") And yet a movie can have all these flaws and triumph. Mr. Gibson has done this by absolutely refusing to patronize his audience. This is the besetting sin in almost every recent attempt to "make scripture relevant". Each looks down a long nose; each says Here is a form of Christianity specially adapted for simpletons like you. Mr. Gibson despises the elite that does this and his movie shows contempt for their strictures. It is just a movie however and Christians who find that their spiritual lives are thrown into turmoil by it must ask themselves how deeply they believed. The movie is worth having not as a means to salvation but as an affront to the contemporary depiction of Jesus as a gliberal "nice guy". It nails the meat back on the empty cross. Mr. Gibson has hurled a much-needed slab of bloodied flesh in the face of "Christianity Lite". And this is in turn a contribution to the "ecumenical dialogue". For it is a Catholic reply to the polite progressive Protestant request for a bloodless Christ. It is a reminder that in true Christian religion there is an order of logic -- and before we can be resurrected we will first have to die. The Crucifixion is the message of Christ on our side of the grave and especially in Lent it behoves us to contemplate that message carefully. In this sense the movie is indeed a voice crying in the wilderness. But it is a voice commanding action. The salvation of our souls does not depend and could not possibly depend upon watching the right movies. It demands instead that we put Christ's own exemplary sacrifice before us and live that sacrifice in our own lives. For every human being has been assigned his own cross to carry and each provided with the means to lift it by the saving grace. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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