Village Voice

X-ploitative though it may be, the spectacle of a man beaten and tortured to death seeks to be an object of contemplation. Serious questions are raised. Is there any other religion so rooted in the representation of human suffering? At last, the pain pageant ends—the heavens open, the earth quakes, and Satan's wig flies off. In the final moments, Jesus emerges from his grave, tanned, rested, and ready—accompanied by appropriately kick-ass martial music. Payback time.

Sitting through the film's garishly staged suffering, one might well ponder the millions of people—victims of crusades, inquisitions, colonial conquests, the slave trade, political terror, and genocide—who have been tortured and killed in Christ's name.

I didn't really have any emotional involvement other than simple curiosity, and that makes the film just about worthless. The violence didn't "move" me, it just seemed like a ridiculous amount of overkill. They should have called this "The Bleeding of the Christ," most of the movie is just that, Jesus bleeding. Charge me with deicide if you will, but after about 2/3's of the movie I was begging for the guy to die already so we could all go home.

Well, after walking out of an advanced screening, my first comprehensible thought was this: I really want to kill a Jew.

In recent interviews, Gibson has been uttering the following mantra: "Wait until the film is released. You'll see that I don't blame the Jews." Well, Gibson not only goes out of his way to blame the Jews for Jesus' brutal crucifixion (albeit with a mostly accurate retelling of the gospels), but he goes so far as to portray the Romans as unwilling accomplices, which is, with certainty, a willful distortion of the original text. Meanwhile, Gibson depicts most of the Jews as an angry lynch mob which gains pleasure from watching a man writhe in pain and flood the ground with blood. It would take an act of God to incite more anti-Semitism than this film is sure to ignite.

What it will not do, as much as I suspect Gibson wishes otherwise, is convert the secular masses. The Passion of The Christ is an evangelist's movie: It wants you to confront the depths of Jesus' suffering, until your only choice is to embrace him as the Messiah. But Gibson's zeal is so all-consuming that he makes it too easy to turn him off, to slam the door in his face and send him and his Bible packing to the house next door.

“The Passion of the Christ” has been carefully photographed by the gifted Caleb Deschanel, who makes Gibson’s relatively low-budget production look much bigger than it is. Still, if you flogged yourself for two hours and six minutes, the result might be about as enlightening as this film.

There are scenes of brutal violence to Jesus that do not appear in the Gospels. There are apparent violations of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' advice on how to dramatize the suffering and death of Jesus. And there are supernatural apparitions, particularly an androgynous gliding Satan, who smiles with glee while floating between Jewish priests watching the scourging of the man they considered a false prophet.

"The film doesn't miss an opportunity to show violence against Jesus, and if Jewish characters are the instrument of that violence, it doesn't hesitate to run with it," said Philip A. Cunningham, executive director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, who attended a screening yesterday for critics. "It presents a nonhistorical presentation of the Gospels that can readily be put to anti-Semitic purposes."

A profoundly medieval movie, yes. Brutal almost beyond powers of description, yes. More obsessed with capturing every holy drop of martyr's blood and sacred gobbet of flesh than with any message of Christian love, yes. More than anything, "The Passion of the Christ," which opens tomorrow, seems to be exactly the movie Mel Gibson wanted to make as an abiding profession of his traditionalist Catholic faith. On that score it is a success.

If "Passion" is powerful, though, it is only through the bludgeoning, forensic intensity with which the film dwells on Christ's suffering. If you come seeking theological subtlety, let alone such modern inventions as psychological depth, you'll walk away battered and empty-handed. Focusing his story on the last days of Jesus (Jim Caviezel), Gibson has created the most visually realistic re-creation yet of the Stations of the Cross -- with subtitled dialogue in Latin and Aramaic and a few heavy-handed "artistic" touches daubed on -- but one that is finally as reductive as any small-town Passion play or Classics Illustrated Jesus. Believers will disagree (if they're even still reading this review) but "The Passion" is a must-see only as a cultural talking-point, not as a spiritual milestone.

We've heard some of Christ's Sermon on the Mount by then, and his exhortation to the disciples to love one another "as I have loved you." But the naked, risen Jesus who strides forth from the tomb in the last shot of the film, to the solemn thrum of martial music, does not seem very interested in love. Why should he be? He's off to war.