It’s frustrating when debate around a movie has little to do with the film. Of course, this is common when a film dwells on political or religious themes, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ certainly falls into that category. For those who are embroiled in the religious debate, discussion of the film purely as a film seems silly, perhaps even irrelevant. But to those who don’t come into it with a religious agenda, it is relevant to ask whether or not the film works purely as cinema. And the verdict is not a pleasant one.
While The Passion of the Christ undoubtedly satisfies Gibson’s goal of portraying Christ’s last hours consistently with what is in the bible, it does not work as a movie apart from that agenda. Claustrophobic and lacking in context, this is like some sort of instructional film for those who already know the story well. For others, it is a brutal, yet strangely unaffecting picture of vicious torture. If this was any story other than that of a religious icon, it would be roundly trashed for its self importance, its cardboard, oversimplified characters, its failure to explain who is who and what arises from what, and its ponderous self importance. Instead, of course, the debate is over whether it fairly depicts one religious group or another.
The movie covers Jesus’ (James Caviezel) story from after the last supper through to his death. While there are a few flashbacks to earlier times, these are rare, and mostly only of Christ’s words during the last supper. We are expected to already know the story, thereby giving the brutality of Jewish religious leaders and the Romans a context. From the perspective purely of cinema, particularly for non-Christians, this is a massive failure. To work, this movie needs three times as many flashbacks so we know what it all means, and only a fraction of the brutality – what’s the purpose of having us sit through so much of Jesus’ torture? It’s like showing Gandhi on his deathbed, without bothering to show anything of what he did before, or Martin Luther King at the moment he is shot, again without any context. This will work for some devout Christians, but most viewers will regret the absence of anything more.
Essentially, this movie is a two-hour death scene, and a graphically awful one at that. A lashing at the hands of sadistic Romans leaves Jesus’ flesh ripped to shreds, and then – when Jewish leaders stir the gathered Jerusalem throng into a frenzy of hate against the ‘blasphemer’ – he is sentenced to die, setting the scene for a long and painful (both for him and for us watching) trek carrying the cross to where he will die.
The claustrophobia of the film comes both from its perspective – zeroed right in on the events of this day with few glimpses of what came before and therefore what it all means – and from Gibson’s decision to keep the camera close in on Jesus for almost the entire film. We see the crowd around him now and again, but the only visuals in this film that you will remember are of Jesus’ torn flesh and blood. This might be exactly what Gibson intended, as it appears the film is intended more as a religious act of personal significance to the filmmaker than it is a film reaching out for a broad audience – particularly of those less familiar with the story as laid out in the New Testament. For moviegoers without a similar agenda, The Passion of the Christ is nothing but an unpleasant experience.
