By Mary Doria Russell
I hadn't planned on seeing THE PASSION until I was asked to review it. I had a nightmare before the movie opened: Mel Gibson had decided to make a movie about my mother, who is dying of ovarian cancer, "So you will understand what she's suffering." He forced a camera into her and made me stare at the tissue being replaced by formless gray jelly. I rarely have bad dreams, but the prospect of a detailed demonstration of the effects of first-century Roman capital punishment gave me some serious psychological willies.I shouldn't have worried. My nightmare about Mom's very real cancer was way worse than Mr. Gibson's fictional gore-fest.
First let me say that it's a darn good thing Mr. Gibson assured everyone that this movie isn't anti-Semitic. Gosh, you could've fooled me! Good Jews are those who accept Jesus as the Messiah; anyone who doesn't is wicked, nasty, mean, and ugly, too. We have the traditional exculpation of Pontius Pilate -- a politically expedient free pass given by Christians hoping to differentiate themselves from Jews who were fighting a war of liberation against Rome when the Synoptic Gospels were written. This movie is a passion play just like the ones that have fostered anti-Semitism during the past thousand years. At least Jesus isn't blond in this version.
Oddly, and falsely, the movie is being touted as "gospel truth," so to speak, but I estimate only a third is scriptural. Important aspects of the dialogue and story are original to Mr. Gibson's screenplay. Thuggish Jewish soldiers throw Jesus off a wall, where he is jerked to a stop by his chains -- a gruesome reprise of Tom Cruise's controlled drop in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, but a stunt, not a gospel moment. The Pharisees say they want Pilate to crucify Jesus because their laws don't permit capital punishment, but then we see the aborted stoning of Mary Magdalene in flashback (I guess in Mr. Gibson's screenplay they were just trying to scare her). There are several bizarre nongospel appearances by Satan, who at one point seems to hold a bald baby revealed to be an adult male achondroplastic dwarf (their eyebrows are shaved--standard movie code for "here be evil"). The movie ends with this figure being swirled up into heaven. Huh?There's also a moment when Pilate's wife suddenly appears at Mary's side and mysteriously presents her with a nice white woolen robe. Later Mary uses it to clean up the blood after Jesus is scourged, scrubbing away at cobblestones like she's washing a kitchen floor.
And that brings me to the real trouble with this flick: it's just a lousy movie, almost devoid of character development. The much-mentioned relationship between mother and son is flat, and I blame bad direction for that. Mary overreacts in a flashback when the child Jesus stumbles and skins his knee, dashing in (badly overused) slo-mo to his side, sweeping him up in a frantic clutch of overwrought maternal love. This same mother barely registers dismay when her son is all but flayed alive before her eyes. A single glycerin tear rolls down her unmoving face as she gazes at the result of tedious hours of make-up artistry depicting the effects of scourging.
The film came alive for me only when Roman soldiers pull Simon of Cyrene out of the crowd to carry the cross for a stumbling Jesus. Actor Jarroth Merz's believable and engaging Simon protests being drafted for this task. He doesn't want to leave his wife unescorted outside the walls of Jerusalem, where she might be accosted as a prostitute. He's afraid he'll be mistaken for a criminal because he's carrying a cross. He makes the Romans promise they won't get confused about who's to be executed. When he first hefts the cross, Simon flinches at the breath of the half-dead man he's helping.
Roman soldiers continue to beat the daylights out of Jesus all the way up to Golgotha, until even the nervous Simon shouts in exasperation, "Stop it! Can't you see he can't go any further?" It was just then that I was thinking, "Enough already with the falling!" The Gospels say Jesus fell three times, but evidently Mr. Gibson decided that there wasn't sufficient brutality during the endless scourging scene, and that the New Testament could be improved on. His Jesus crashes to the ground nine or 10 times, always in agonizingly slow motion.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST is a cinematic Rorschach test, inspiring some viewers and infuriating others. The film raises many issues, with controversy centering on its depiction of Jewish opposition to Jesus. This debate, while understandable, focuses attention in the wrong place and so encourages Christians and Jews to talk past each other. Moreover, it allows Christians to deflect the charge of anti-Judaism too easily.
The root of the problem is the failure on the part of many Christians to read Scripture -- including but not limited to the Passion narratives -- in its historical context. Much of the New Testament was written during the bitter and protracted divorce between Judaism and Christianity. This dispute colors the text in countless ways, including, for example, the portrayal of the Pharisees in Matthew and the characterization of the Jewish law in Paul.
