Empty Prayer, Empty Mouths, Talk About the Passion
Yesterday I finally got around to seeing The Passion of the Christ. I’ve delayed this long because, like a dentist appointment, while I knew it would be good for me, I scorned putting myself through the experience. This is often the case with challenging movies–I know I should see them, but it’s often hard to motivate myself. Yesterday, I eschewed the pack of Jolly Ranchers that was The Girl Next Door and attended Mr. Gibson’s latest epic.
I paid for my ticket at one of those self-service machines that so many people seem to ignore like a leper. I was amused to note that, when I choose The Passion, the screen displayed the film’s rating: R. This film, however, had a non-standard addition to the usual ‘extreme violence, torture’ warning. It read ‘may be offensive to the religious’. It’s the first time I’ve seen this particular caveat. Surely this isn’t the first film to meet those requirements?
If I put aside the religious context of the film, and evaluate The Passion based on my standard criteria for feature films, it falls dreadfully short:
- Plot: The central dramatic question–will Jesus be crucified?–is answered far too early. There are no reversals or twists in the story, and the film lacks suspense.
- Character Development: None of the characters change in the course of the film. In fact, we’re barely given any information about them at all.
- Acting: While the performances are generally strong, they’re singular. James Caviezel suffers. Monica Bellucci and Maia Morgenstern mourn. Only the actors playing the more minor roles–Simon, Pilate, Peter get to display much range.
- Theme: The film’s morality is muddy at best. Without more information about the context of Jesus’s suffering and the sins of humanity, it’s unclear what the movie’s central message is.
In truth, though, The Passion is more of a docudrama. Yet, even in this it only preaches to the choir. Even a dramatization needs to offer a backstory, introduce the personalities and elucidate confusing passages. If you hadn’t grown up in the western world and were totally unfamiliar with the Bible, what would you make of Gibson’s Last Supper flashback? It’s brief and obtuse–should Peter and the others eat Jesus? What does it mean when he says the bread is his body? I know the answers to these questions, but most of the world doesn’t.
Gibson has been very fond of espousing his loyalty to an accurate depiction of the Gospels. After seeing the films, I went back and read the Gospels to compare. Regarding Jesus’s final day, he does follow the scriptures carefully. However, as with any adaptation, his interpretation is far from literal. In the film, there is a gory scene of at least 10 minutes in which Jesus is whipped and beaten by the Roman soldiers. This beating is referenced in only two of the four Gospels, and occupies a single sentence in each. In John, “Then Pilate took Jesus and scourged him” and in Matthew, “and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified”. Gibson takes a minor note of this Bible story and turns it into a lengthy sequence that borders on the pornographic. In another instance, Gibons seems to ignore the fact that at least two of the Gospels say that when Jesus is taken to Herod, the king sends him away ‘arraying him in gorgeous apparel’.
I might also add that despite his/her (it’s very ambiguous) appearance throughout the movie, Satan isn’t anywhere to be seen in Jesus’s final day as a man. Gibson also takes license with the brief flashback sequences. Why does he choose to show the ones he does, and not others? If his goal is to depict Jesus’s suffering, why do we see him teaching or breaking bread with his disciples? Personally, those were the parts of the film that interested me most–the main action was pretty predictable.
I compare this movie with another, more-accessable spiritual docudrama: Martin Scorsese’s Kundun. It has its own problems, but it does a much better job of explaining its central elements–the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the precepts of Buddhism, the invasion of Tibet. In fact, Gibson doesn’t even bother to explain what’s going on–he just assumes everybody knows who this Jesus guy is, who those two women called Mary are, and wades–knee-deep in Jesus’s blood–on through.
Roger Ebert is referring to Kundun, but his words are even more applicable to The Passion: [the film is] ‘an act of devotion, an act even of spiritual desperation, flung into the eyes of 20th century materialism’.
It’s unfortunate that Gibson’s film is only for the believers. For those people, I’m not surprised that the film is a deeply spiritual experience. For the rest of us, however, it asks far too much.
[UPDATE] Via Roger Ebert’s review of the film, I found these two (note his comment on The Magdalene Sisters) insightful commentaries. I don’t entirely agree with them, but the author is obviously very well-read and makes articulate arguments.
