 |
|||
 |
 |
||
 | |||
 | |||||||||||
|
|
Written by XXX; directed by Mel Gibson; starring Jim Caviezel and Monica Bellucci. Released to DVD on August 27, 2004.
Exiting the screening room where I’d seen writer/director Mel Gibson’s latest project, The Passion of the Christ (The Passion), I was approached by a television reporter who wanted to know if I would share my feelings on-camera about how my life had changed now that I’d seen the movie. Walking back to my subway station at the corner of Chicago and State, I was approached by a man selling Streetwise, the newspaper that benefits the homeless. He accompanied me for about a block, trying to get me to buy a copy of Streetwise. When I mentioned that I’d just come from seeing The Passion his salesmanship was dropped. He asked me what I thought of the film and I replied that it wasn’t bad. "Not bad?" the man questioned, "This is Jesus we’re talking about, my brother." He nodded at me and then said, "This isn’t just another movie, you know." At lunch the next day, the two women seated at the table next to me were engaged in a fierce argument about the fact that one of the women wasn’t going to allow her 10-year old son to see Gibson’s violent and brutally graphic interpretation of Christ’s last twelve hours on Earth. Everywhere I went, it seemed as though someone had another, dare I say, passionate opinion about the film. It was pornography. It was anti-Semetic. It was the true interpretation of the bible. It was something every American should be required to see. It was the most influential film ever made. It was horribly biased. On and on, people went. Strangely, all these differing viewpoints held one thing in common: not one of them was about the movie itself. By creating what is arguably the most controversial film in cinema history, Gibson has succeeded in one endeavor I never thought possible: he created a film that was immune to criticism. With so many people up in arms about so many different parts of The Passion, believing, not believing, arguing and interpreting, no one seemed to care about the filmmaking techniques behind the story and message. I found this interesting for two distinct reasons: 1) Jesus’ life and teachings are the moral compasses for many different people in this world, yet no one was discussing the film’s portrayal of him, and 2) Gibson adapts such an overt, demonstrative and in-your-face style of direction that the film occasionally comes across as heavy-handed propaganda, which almost always causes debates (or at least it does for Michael Moore). After later making the comment to a church-going friend of mine that I didn’t think The Passion had much character development and then enduring through his defensive tongue lashing, I realized why people were straying away from any real criticism of the movie: to criticize The Passion was to criticize The Bible… and that’s not a fight anyone wants to pick. Gibson is a talented director, as his Oscar win for Braveheart would suggest, but you wouldn’t know this by watching The Passion. It’s not simply Gibson’s near criminal misuse of Monica Bellucci that I found peculiar, it was his inability to let his material speak for itself. You’d figure that The Bible would be one script that would able to stay on message, but apparently it just wasn’t good enough for Gibson’s taste. Whenever Gibson’s wants his audience to get the message he doesn’t simply present it, he hammers home. More is always better, or so goes the rationale here. Instead of a minimum of slow-motion hero shots of Jesus, Gibson includes dozens. Instead of keeping the level of violence tolerable, Gibson ramps it up to an almost unwatchable extreme. And instead of employing a soothing melodic score, Gibson cranks up the volume on John Debney’s composition, effectively rendering it one of the loudest and most ostentatious scores of the last decade. From what I have read, I envision Jesus to be a soft-spoken, tolerant and patient man. Ironically, in his effort to create the definitive film about Jesus in The Passion, Gibson failed to include any of the qualities that made Jesus such a wonderful role model in his movie. Gibson deserves a significant amount of credit for putting his own money on the line in order to make this film–he wanted to do something different and so he did–and he also earns a degree of respect for his decision to have his actors speak Latin and Aramaic, rather than that of English, but he loses substantially more credibility for his crass style of bullying his points home. The Passion was an intriguing film that, in all honesty, did exactly what it set out to do. It seems quite a stretch though to suggest that my life is now somehow different because I have now had the opportunity to view The Passion. After all, despite the common perception across America, we are just talking about a movie.
chris neumer yes, it's true: Jim Caviezel was actually struck by lighting while on the crossing filming Jesus' crucification scene. |
| |||||
