Review-The Passion of The Christ:A Historicity Perspective

I watched this film yesterday. I could have taken an unroasted roast from the refrigerator and beat it with a meat tenderizer for two or three hours and gotten the same effect.

It wouldn't bleed enough. It's a thriller in the genre of "Friday the 13th" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" dressed up in artfilm disguise -- a disguise made from painted cheesecloth.

What a waste of good film.

I think that a certain sado-masochistic bent is a prerequisite for anyone to enjoy this ketchup-laden type of slasher movie. Even fundamentalist Christians recognize that the central theme of the Jesus story is the 'resurrection', not the unmitigated horror which preceded it. The Romans crucified thousands of people. In this respect, at least, Jesus was in no way unique. So why dwell on what was, essentially, a commonplace in 1st century Judea? Because to do so can be exploitative to the nth degree.

I can see a whole audience of fundamentalists bawling and feeling angry through the whole thing. I wanted to turn it off, but in the interest of "being informed" I watched all of it. I had to do it much the way I watched King Kong as a small kid. I watched Kong with peripheral vision, being too scared to look directly at the screen. During Passion, I busied myself making a stew and looking at the tv over the bar.

The Passion of the Christ Revisited: Comment #2
The Passion of the Christ: A Second Look

There has been so much reaction to my first review, critique, comment on Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of the Christ’ that I felt a need to write a second statement. This statement will deal with some, but not all, of the main threads of response that I received. The responses, mostly postings at internet sites, were not responses so much to what I wrote but, rather, responses to issues raised by the film itself. My article served more as a heuristic, a provocative stimulant or, if the truth be known, my article simply served as an excuse, a reason, to say what people really felt about the film. Most people did not tak about my article at all.

The first concern of those who sent me emails was the violence in the film. That seemed to be the most generalized concern, although there were many cryptic responses that gave vent in sometimes creative and often puzzling ways to various conspiracy theories, to a range of anti-Jewish or anti-government sentiments and a host of other passionate and not-so-passionate worries of the respondents such as the lack of character development of the person of Jesus.

The literature on violence in cinema and society is burgeoning. That was a major concern more than 25 years ago when I taught media studies at what became a university in Ballarat, an old gold mining town, in Australia. So, too, is the concern with real violence. The violent image has been extraordinarily preeminent in the visual media as is the profound concern about the culture of violence in general. There has been, what you might call, a hyperviolence in post-1960s cinema. I was only 19 when Kennedy was shot in 1963. I have lived in a society filled with real violence and hyperviolence for more than 40 years. But so too did my parents and grandparents living as they did through WW1 and WW2

Gibson’s film in some ways is just one of 1000s in cinemaland that have a violent base. The media is now both scapegoat and cause, explanatory framework and rational for the violent society. Of course, religion and politics have been intertwined with violence since the days of universal animism in 6000 to 8000 BP. One writer whom I read over twenty years ago, Guy Murchie, wrote that we’ve had 14,400 wars in recorded history. Violence is as human, it appears, as apple pie or should I say potatoes, pasta or pumpkins?

In The Passion we are exposed to Gibson’s serious effort to represent a particular conflict, a crucial event, in the history of Christianity and to connect that event to a set of accompanying emotional sensibilities. Can we arrive at a historical account faithful to the evidence when we move from prose, from books, to film? Poets like Homer(750 BC ca) and historians like Thucydides(420 BC) exaggerated and invented what they wrote to please and engage the audience. It became a convention of historians to insert made-up, but appropriate, speeches for 2000 years, until at least the sixteenth century.1 Just as poetry can enhance the power of history to convey aspects of the past so, too, can film.

But poetry and film can also be creatures of invention with little connection with the experienced world or the historical past. Film has had only a century to find its way as a medium for history. It’s future, I think, suggests some exciting possibilities. But along the way there will be many false starts. For many, Gibson's film was down that road of false starts.

No single view holds "the truth." Our eyes and ears are different than those of 2000 years ago. Small fragments are inevitably incomplete and this film contained, at best, a small fragment. There is a final unknowability, as Spielberg said in discussing the efforts of film makers to capture the lives of great men. Freud(1.1) said the same of biography in print. A movie blends fiction with true events.2 Considerable artistry, ingenuity and money went into giving "an overall impression of what it really would be like to be transported back into that time"3 of the life of Jesus of Nazereth. For millions, if not for all, Gibson achieved this effect. For millions, too, he did not.



But there remains, it seems to me, too cavalier an attitude to the evidence about lives and attitudes in the past. This evidence is all we have to go on and the imagination must work from there. The danger is that the audience is left with the false impression of "a true story." Considerable dramatic license is taken by directors. The truth status of historical films often remains unclear, obscure. In this film, the story comes from the New Testament. And the evidence in the New Testament is far from clear. It may be clear to those with a more fundamentalist theology, but it has not been clear for at least two hundred years to literally millions of students of the New Testament, liberals, agnostics, atheists, non-Christians, ex-Christians, et cetera.



History is not a closed venture, fixed and still, but open to new discovery and reinterpretation. Spectators don’t just look in at the events of history becoming in the process all-knowing. They look at and engage with the ideology of the director and make their assessments partly in terms of their own ideology, often conscious and unconscious, that they themselves espouse. It is this, among other things, that gives rise to the varied reactions to a film like Gibson’s.

Then, too, cultural historians generally acknowledge that there is a time lag between the moment a new technology like film is invented(1895) and when a full understanding and utilization of the potential of that technology emerges. After one hundred years, I often think we have just begun to utilize the power of cinema. I wonder how long it took civilization to begin to use the wheel with dramatic effect after its invention in about 3500 BC?



The flow of images in our lives is increasingly torrential. Film images often cloud reality with pseudo-events. We are often adrift in an illusion that seems real. Peter Weir’s 1998 film "The Truman Show" illustrated what is often called ‘the cultivation effect.’ Put another way, cinema transforms the world into a spectacle. There is a mysterious energy in the swirl of shadows and light in film that is sometimes called mise en scene and it often produces a vain and empty show, a show that bears the mere semblance of reality. It is this mise en scene that captures our attention, or repels it, although often we are looking at a vapour in the desert which we dream to be water but, when we try to taste it, we find it is but illusion.



We often get moved and satisfied as much, though, by illusion as by reality. In the last decade there has seen the beginning of a demise of the cinephiliac. The love-affair with movies in western society is in decline, or so say some analysts.4 Millions of us have also developed a stimulus shield to protect ourselves from cinema’s neurological shocks. But the story has an up and a down-side. In cinema we also recover our own sensuous experience; history is disclosed to us in unique ways.

The upside of that vaporous illusion is a sense of the real. Proust referred to this as memoire involuntaire, being seized by memories, by mixtures of the past and present which flow into a strange no man’s land. What was once ignored by us in our daily lives often becomes registered with a striking, sensuous clarity because of film. Movies often grip us in a way that life does not. It is not so much the illusion of reality that movies create as the construction and organization of reality that goes on, an order and identity not found in daily life. Movies tend to be easily grasped, accessible in a way not present in daily life especially with complex aspects of history and psychology. Such cinematic experience must be countered by some voluntary memory in the service of the intellect.



The Passion was Gibson’s third movie as a director. All his movies involve a culminating spectacle where the doomed hero faces death agonies. His movies, as director, all employ the sufferings of the title character to critique the social structures imposed on them. They all present decadent societies that have lost contact with traditional patriarchal values. Gibson is a champion of conservative and vanishing social orders.5 He is also a champion of Christianity. You might not like what he does, but he has electrified and annoyed millions for both good and ill. Perhaps, in the long run, it will just be another movie from the movie mill. Surely not!

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FOOTNOTES__________________________



1 N.Z. Davis, Film as Historical Vision, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, p.4.
1.1 One reader of this my second review had such a vehement anti-Freud bias that half his comments were concerned with undermining my reference to Freud and anything that existed in Freud's 28 volumes of writings.
2 ibid., p.126.

3 ibid, p.127.
4. Christian Keathley, "the Cinephiliac Moment," Framework: the Journal of Cinema and Media, 2000.
Attendance at movie houses was highest in the USA in 1936(or was it 37?).
5William Luhr, "Mutilating Mel: Martyrdom and Masculinity in Braveheart," Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, editor, Chistopher Sharrett, Wayne State UP, Detroit, 1999, p.229.
__________________
Ron Price is a retired teacher, aged 60. He taught for 30 years in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools. He lives with his wife, Chris, in Tasmania.

I find the film too bereft of good points to care about all that.

Ron, much as I may disagree with some of your conclusions, permit me to congratulate you on a well-researched, thoughtful and well-written piece.

Reply to Merry Andrew: Seasoned Veteran
Thank you , Andrew. It seems, thusfar, most of the reactions to my two pieces on 'The Passion' were negative. I used the film, I must confess, to help me deal with issues of a broader relevance than the violence which seems to have been the focus of concern and emotional reaction, for most people. I heard today that the film has moved into the top ten in the history of film as a money spinner. The film cost 30 million to make and 20 to advertise. The writer of the piece I read regarded the film as a critique of secular humanism, the core philosophy of western society. I'm not so sure. Anyway, I appreciated your feedback, Andrew.-Ron

The most on-target criticism of the film was by A. O. Scott of the New York Times, a review that has been posted here on other "The Passion of the Christ" threads. The film did manage to rout out the Christian who generally did not go to the cinema. However, divide the total box office by the average ticket price and barely 15% of Christians world wide went to see the film. This doesn't take into account those who just had to see the agony and the scant ecstasy more than once. It also doesn't take into account how many were Catholic as the Protestant religion has historically rejected iconic representations of Christ and using it as well as salvation in a way to achieve monetary gain. I suggest going back and reading why Luther adamantly rejected the Catholic church and started the reformation. If one wants to read about some real violence where many were slaughtered, read about the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre and the Huguenots.

Mel's outing are predominantly violent, bloody films like "Mad Max," the "Lethal Weapon" movies, et al. His foray into comedy is laughable only because it's so lame. He's a two-dimensional actor and a two-dimensional director. The cinematographer was the one saving grace of "Passion" (I wasn't impressed with Caviezal's portrayal as yet another Hollywood beefcake Christ). "Braveheart" is a watchable film but in the end, it's an action/adventure flick that's overrated and also distorts history. I'm aware that there aren't many historic films that don't play fast and loose with historic fact. It's the pretense that "Passion" is faithful to the Bible or history and rationalizing that Mel intended to make up his own telling of the tale is prosaic speculation at best. The film isn't any better or perhaps no worse than other Biblical epics. My favorite of the historic films of that time in history was "The Fall of the Roman Empire" which did stay reasonably close to historic fact. "Ben Hur" still remains the champion in Biblical films and with adjustment for inflation beats out "Passion" by nearly 200%. The box office still remains a false criteria of the artistic success of any film. Nine Oscars helps and a director like William Wyler, about 1,000 leagues ahead of a Mel Gibson.

With Appreciation to Lightwizard
A pleasure to read your posting today on "The Passion." Thanking you--Ron Price, Tasmania.

I did want to give credit to the fine soundtrack scoring by John Denby.

Here'a recent review from IMDb by a moviegoer from the UK:

bob the moo
Birmingham, UK

Date: 2 May 2004
Summary: As a film it is average at best. As a religious story it is as spiritually and emotionally fulfilling as pornography

Ambushed and arrested in the dead of night, Jesus is hauled before a Jewish court where he is found guilty of blasphemy and taken to the Romans for justice. Pontius Pilate presides over the subsequent demands from the Pharisees to have Jesus put to death but, unable to find any reason for such sentence, decides to placate the crowd by having Jesus beaten. However, when this fails to satisfy the demands, Pilate decrees that Jesus should be put to death by crucifixion.

After all the hype, protesting, mudslinging, block-booking and arguing had died down I decided that now was probably a good time for me to go to see this film as an ordinary cinema-goer. I tried to come to it as best I could with an open mind and I settled into it conscious of tales of emotional overload and audiences in tears etc. Sadly I was left incredibly cold by a film that, while I won't call rubbish, is certainly one of the weakest films I have seen this year. For me, the vast majority of the blame for this must lie with Gibson - as with many labour of loves, he seems to have lost his ability to be critical with his own work and thus he has made what he wanted to make regardless of whether it works or not.

The deepest of flaws is the total lack of characters. We all know the story and for those of the audience that believe in Jesus and understand the sacrifice, the emotion of the story is already there before the film even starts - Gibson knows this and he relies almost 100% on this fact. His Jesus is never a person, never a character, I'm sure it will upset people but here he was no more than an object. For the vast majority of the film, Jesus is silent apart from cries coming from behind bloody make up. The flashbacks are bitty and don't manage to really convey an understanding of who Jesus was, how full of love he was and what he'd come to do - no, the focus is the blood, which is fine if you are coming to the film just for that reason. However as a film I expect character - there is no excuse for the film to have not done this even a bit; if I see a biopic of a famous person I'll still expect the film to give that person character rather than just assuming we all know who they are, likewise here - it is lazy and detrimental to just starting beating this person with little or no background.

The issue of characters is also the reason for the anti-Semitic cries. Did Gibson set out to attack Jews in this film? I doubt it. What he did do though, is repeat what he did in Braveheart - create pantomime bad guys. He cannot create villains: like Braveheart, the `hero' is a morally perfect person who is treated with awe and wonder, while the baddies (be they the English or the Jews) are horribly simplified pantomime villains. I found it hard not to laugh during the trial before the Jewish council so hammy and overplayed was it! The only character I felt for was Mary and that was the one time I felt a flashback worked - we see Jesus falling as a child and an adult, both with Mary running to him. That struck it home for me that, regardless of who he was, he was still her son and that she was seeing her son die, not a god. Aside from this I sat cold - unable to see people, only images.

What shocked me most about the violence was just how unmoved I was by it. It was gory and I can appreciate that many will find it difficult to watch without flinching. There are gorier films but I think the mix of the camera's unflinching gaze, the cruelty of it and the audiences' knowledge of the significance of the violence makes it harder to watch. However, the lack of character in Jesus made him a walking special effect - not a real person. I have heard a reading of the medical detail of the crucifixion and found that hard to take - but that was because I knew who the person was in my head; in this film there is nothing to do that for me and I had not come prepared for the fact that Gibson expected me to do a lot of work for him while he merely provided the gore. I was surprised, given Gibson's understanding of the significance of the story, that he didn't trust it to be impacting enough by itself. So on top of the gore we have Satan running round the place with deformed, fiendish children acting as harpies of a sort and other gory additions designed to give the film as dark a tone as it possibly could.

The writing not only fails to make characters, it also fails to make much of an impact. In the gory scenes there is little dialogue, but in the flashback scenes it is also cut back to be almost two sentence summaries of major moments in his life (the sermon on the mount is flashbacked in 30 seconds). The writing of these flashback scenes is all over the place - some of them work but for everyone that works there is one that is so short that you wonder why he bothered. If anyone can explain to me why one of the flashbacks involved Jesus showing Mary how he has just invented tables and chairs (I kid you not) then I'll give you money to me it was a really misjudge attempt at comedy.

Of course, with no characters and no dialogue to speak of, Gibson falls back on that old reliable puller of heartstrings - music. The score sweeps up and down in majestic ways and it is more impacting that anything else, but in a rather cheap and manipulative way. Also, the gore is very realistic and, if you can get past all the flaws above, then it is very likely you will be moved by the sheer visceral nature of the whole thing. I couldn't get past how weak the film was and thus sat cold - even in a horror movie, gore for gore's sake will do nothing for me.

The actors are betrayed by so many of Gibson's decisions. The decision to film in Aramaic etc seemed to mean that the cast were pronouncing their words phonetically rather than acting. This meant a lot of them overcompensate their inability to really put feeling into their lines by overdoing facial expressions etc. Caviezel is lost behind several things. He is lost behind Gibson's fearful reverence for Jesus. He is lost behind having to deliver dialogue without having been given a character and he is lost behind all that makeup. Like other movie Christs, he just puts on a forgiving and loving look and walks like we've seen him do in lots of other films. The rest of the cast all give the same performances based on the group they fall into: all the disciples etc are browbeaten and filled with sorrow, the Roman soldiers are all cruel and laddish, while all the Pharisees are hammy and filled with rage. The only person I felt really gave a performance was Shopov's Pilate - Gibson seemed to have no point to make here and allowed him to play a person. Shopov uses that freedom to paint a realistic man, trapped with a bad decision to make - the only off note is that his character is used to shift all blame to the Jewish council.

Overall I was surprised by just how poor a film this was. If you are already deeply moved by the sacrifice of Jesus then this film will shock you into deeper appreciation of that sacrifice. However `shocking' is not the same as `emotionally impacting' and if you are relying on Gibson to give you any emotional involvement in the story then you will be really let down - he has relied on you to bring that with you to the cinema. For that reason I found the film to be weak as a film. However, even as a telling of this great story, the version is too reliant on gore over character and the fallout from this for me was that I was never hit by the violence because it was not a person it was happening to - Gibson had practically made him an object. This is not to say that some bits weren't difficult to watch, they were, but too much of it lacked any emotional or spiritual input from Gibson; like I say, the film wants that all to come from the audience. For that reason I was left cold by this and can only assume that those who love and adore this film are simply confusing their love and admiration for Jesus himself with their feelings towards this film.

I agree with the way the scoring and the cinematography was used to instill some legitimacy into the film as an artwork. In the end, it's just another potboiler Biblical epic on the artistic level of "Barbarossa."

That Makes 2 Reflective Thought-Provoking Commentaries
Most comments these days that I read about films don't seem to say much. But the last two at this site on Gibson's film kept my mind pleasantly engaged, occasionally genuinely stimulated and with an overall appreciation for the work of their authors.-Thanks, Ron Price

I don't think the film was supposed to be entertaining though, or meant for people who don't already have the background. It is plain and simple a film about the last hours of Jesus' life, and the pain and suffering he undergoes. Background information shouldn't even be necessary to understand THAT. I also don't think Mel Gibson put the flashbacks in there to give you a history of Jesus' life (since they didn't really do that- the ones with the child falling and the "tall chairs" aren't even in the Bible), they were just there to give your eyes some relief from the (I'll admit) melodramatic tone.



I think Judas was not. He has always appealed to me as a flawed Apostle, and the film does portray him well, haunted by the demons, and eventually driven to suicide. Hardly the unconflicted killer.



Have you read "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel? (Not the kiddie version) There is a section in it that describes the gore excruciatingly well.



But of course. Was this fellow expecting Jesus to talk while he was being whipped to near death?



I don't think they were implying that he invented tall tables and chairs. It was probably a commissioned project.



If one only wanted gore and music, then he or she could have rented Gladiator.



Actually, a majority of the cast actually spoke Aramaic (or close to) as their native language. Gibson even needed a translator on set, so if any acting was lost, it was not for phonetics.

The automatic quote feature left me as the author of the user review from IMDb and I did not write what you are replying to.

Nevertheless, it does not change my opinion of the film as a film. There is nothing new in the cinematic technique and it, in fact, includes such cliches as the demons -- straight out of any conventional horror flick.

I do agree that the film is preaching to the choir which is why a small percentage of the choir managed to pump up the box office on the basis of today's ticket prices. Enormous blocks of ticket were purchased by church groups and the DVD has opened to over 4M in copies sold the first day. I guess some want to revisit the gore on a monthly basis as it is lauded for fortifying one's beliefs. There can't be any fixation of the basic sadomasochistic element present other Gibson projects he's been involved in. "Mad Max" is now going to make it's annual cable tour so one can see what many feel is another Christ figure in action.

For a not-so-glossy, real artfilm, I suggest seeing Pier Paolo Pasolini's
"The Gospel According to St. Mathew."

BTW, the Romans spoke in Latin in the film when Greek was spoken by the majority of the population.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I know it wasn't by you, and I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was. I guess I just didn't want to address my diatribe to "Bob the Moo" :wink:

Just make sure the "diatribe" doesn't slip into proselytizing for Mel's movie. You won't convert those who love films and recognize a great film from a marginal achievement.