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.