The Passion of the Christ The Passion of the Christ (September 03, 2004)

Fox Home Video VHS & DVD
2 hrs 7 mins
Director: Mel Gibson

"The Passion of the Christ" is Mel Gibson's megalomaniac view of the last 12 hours of Jesus' life as if a tormented monk told it in a fervor. Gibson, a director who always loves to bring his subject matter to fever pitch, leaves nothing left to wring from the agony of Christ, where blood seems to flow in torrents through the dusty streets and apathetic stones. Gibson, however, forgets to interject one important emotional crux - taking the enigma of Christ and making it human. Not once did I feel that the character (remember - this is a film) of Jesus was racked with human emotions as in Kazantzakis "The Last Temptation of Christ" where he was plagued with self-doubt and remorse, only then to willingly die for a greater cause while hanging from the cross. In "The Passion" only flimsy, forced flashbacks try to bring Jesus' sufferings into the immediate bloodshed, leaving the viewer feeling detached and empty.

"The Passion" begins with a beautifully drawn passage of sinister agony that seems to have been lifted from a 1940s espionage film. The camera wades through the fog-shrouded garden, only to find Jesus (James Caviezel) fevered and bloodied from his agony of foretold torture to come. As he prays, an androgynous Satan torments him with doubt and gives birth to a snake as its offering to walk away. It is a moment that Gibson rarely achieves again in the film, mixing the immediate sufferings with the negative temporal always ready to pounce.

The film's centerpiece, the horrid scourging of Christ, although effective in many ways, smacks of circus exploitation at its dirtiest. It is in the tradition of violence as a piece of entertainment, whose predecessors like the Normandy Beach landing in "Saving Private Ryan" and any one of Hitchcock's murder pieces (the shower scene in "Psycho" comes to mind), are used as a dare for the audience to watch. "The Passion" may be a little more humanistic, meaning that I found in talking to others that the general response was wanting an end to the long passage (10 minutes!). Since Christ is such an enigma in the film we are left with our own impressions of the torture. By this time in the film, however, I feel that the audience is ready for the end, which is still a long way off.

"The Passion of the Christ" is a curiosity to me. Phenomenally successful, it boggles my mind how, in essence, a religious art film of such violent and depressing proportions could be so popular in our mass culture. Even at the ending's deflated resurrection scene, I felt more punished than rewarded because the Christ was treated as an object, only to rise again with not a hint of hope in its eyes. In fact, I can only recommend Caleb Deschanel's beautiful cinematography and production designer Francesco Frigeri's sets, which make the audience feel they were watching the events unfold in a giant Gothic cathedral painted in the burnt colors of winter. Except for that, "The Passion of the Christ" made me think that not a presence but an absence of spirituality waits for the viewer at the film's end. -Joe Ramirez

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