By Cynthia Citron   
   
Going in, you know it's going to be violent.  Certainly enough has been written and said about it to give you fair warning.  But no matter what you've read or heard, you can never be prepared for the unremitting, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing bloodiness of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

The story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, as Gibson portrays it, is unrelenting savagery perpetrated by caricatures of evil and depravity. It is a story told with the assumption that everyone knows the story.  So almost nobody is identified by name and there is very little of Jesus' early life and teachings to explain why the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious council, has turned so viciously against him. Caiphas, the high priest of the Jews, is depicted with no redeeming qualities.  He denounces Jesus as a blasphemer and false prophet.  He rouses the mob to call for Jesus' death.  He sardonically manipulates Pontius Pilate by declaiming the explicit threat that Jesus poses to Rome.  He makes Shakespeare's Shylock, as a character, pale in comparison.

Pilate, on the other hand, who is never identified, comes off as a sympathetic participant in the unfolding drama, almost an innocent bystander.  Caught between the surging mob and the portending disapproval of his bosses in Rome, he poses metaphysical questions to himself and waffles on making a decision.  As other reviewers have pointed out, this is way out of character for the cruel despot that Pilate was known to be.

And then there is the mob itself.  Cast as a mocking, mindless mass, they are a conglomeration of thoroughly ugly people.  Snaggle-toothed, grizzled, and sneering, they are uniformly repulsive.  Exactly what Hitler had in mind.

The Roman soldiers are also repulsive, but not in the same way.  They are not physically ugly, just spiritually so.  They laugh as they torture Jesus, mocking him in mindless hysteria and ruthless cruelty.  And that brings us to the blood.  First they beat him.  Then they flay him.  Then they burden him with the cross that he is to carry to his death.  And we continually view, in nauseating close-up, the bleeding chunks of flesh.  There is blood everywhere: spurting, dripping, oozing, collecting in puddles.  And still they beat him with whips.  All the way to Calvary.  And each time he falls down, with the cross on top of him, his bloody face in the dirt.  I don't know how long the actual walk to Calvary took, but this picture makes the trip almost in real time.  For most of two hours you watch Jesus' struggle, his repeated falls, the whippings, the blood.  The soldiers chortling as they crunch the crown of thorns into his head and the nails into his hands.  It is total voyeurism of the most despicable kind.  Instead of sympathy, one feels revulsion.

And because the sound track is in Aramaic and Latin, there is a sense of unreality, a distance between the audience and the action.  It feels like an old-time silent movie, with everybody gesturing dramatically, over-acting to compensate for the unintelligible dialogue.  All the minor players, especially, grimace broadly and laugh hugely but without pleasure.

And speaking of the sound track, just in case you might miss the point of what's going on, there is throbbing music, crashes and bangs, and deep resonant thrums. Even with your eyes closed, you know there is DRAMA going on.

There is also a fantastic subplot featuring the devil and children who morph into hideous gnomes, but the less said about them, the better.

And finally, a word must be said about the star.  Jim Caviezel is a beautiful, portrait-perfect Jesus.  He looks the part and his suffering is thoroughly convincing. He'll probably get next year's Oscar.  But please, Academy, let's not reward Gibson for this sickening descent into horror and hell.