The Passion of the Christ is in theaters now, and the reviews are in!
“That’s not acting; that’s staring.”
-Holly, 24“Hey, that wasn’t in the book!”
-Peter Jackson“I cannot accurately review this movie, having given up profanity for Lent.”
-Jimski, 28
Mel Gibson is a carny.
I was really looking forward to this movie, too. I’ve been waiting for this one to come out since they were talking about releasing it without subtitles and letting the acting and imagery speak for themselves. Back when it was called Revenge of the Passion, I was checking the “Coming Soon” sites to see if a studio would actually release it. “Ooh! This kind of flick doesn’t come along every day. How often do you get to see someone put his entire heart and soul into crafting an uncompromised vision of the thing that’s most important to him in the world? In Aramaic? And it’s about my favorite Messiah to boot. Save me a seat!” I have often griped about movie phenomena like Lord of the Rings, which fans declared to be the most magnificent epic ever made – indeed, declared themselves fans – six months before the movie was even finished, let alone shown. Well, that could have been me this time. Rarely am I so poised to enjoy a moviegoing experience; I all but walked into the screening with a “Welcome” sign on my jeans and laid down spread-eagled in front of the screen. What a letdown.
I was ready for the violence. The ending of the movie had been ruined for me a little in advance. It’s not the violence that bothered me (although, don’t get me wrong, the movie is pornography. What exactly is the NC-17 for? I’d like to make this movie again, substituting Lou Ferrigno or a puppy dog for Jesus, just to see if I could even click my stopwatch before the MPAA banned it from every theater in the country. But I digress; the gore was actually the thing about the movie I disliked the least. At least the gore had a point.) The Passion is like a somehow-sillier version of Titanic, where twenty people are playing a version of Billy Zane’s half-note, moustache-twirling, damsel-railroad-track-tying villain, and all twenty of the people are William Shatner. (There’s even an equivalent to Titanic’s painful, groan-inducing “some nobody called Picasso” sequence in which Jesus invents the table. Laugh all you want; I didn’t make it up.) The writer-director wants you to feel every moment and action palpably, and then he apparently instructs everyone to act so bizarrely that only face paint and miming would make it more over the top. Between the dialogue and the delivery, it’s like watching dinner theater written by a high school student. (Any temptation to say, “But the dialogue was from the Bible!” transcends wishful thinking.)
“I don’t know exactly what they’re saying,” I often thought, “but I know no one would ever say it like that.” It’s like… like…
My God, I have had an epiphany.
Pro wrestling. It’s exactly like watching pro wrestling. That absolutely hits the nail on the head, or inaccurately through the palm as the case may be.
There’s scene with the Sanhedrin trying Jesus when a couple of Jewish leaders protest that Jesus’ whole trial is a travesty. When they say this, Caiaphas and their peers and presumed equals morph into Moe the Stooge, shouting, “Get outta here, you!” and girlfight-slapping them out the door like they were transients who wandered onto the set.
And Gibson adds a character! He loves the Gospel so much he changes it, putting the Devil into the story as a character with dialogue. Dressed like an extra from Dune. Occasionally, Gibson has the Devil walk silently through crowd scenes smirking. This is to help you figure out who the bad guys and good guys are in the story of Christ. He also has snakes and maggots occasionally crawl out of the Devil’s orifices. This is so you will know that the Devil is evil. My favorite scene in the entire movie features the Devil. Jesus has just died, and at the moment of his death - and I swear that this is true - they cut to Hell, where the Devil is on his knees going, “Nooooooooo!” Mel Gibson seems to think I have suffered a head injury of some kind.
Speaking of violence, it only bothers me because it’s bad. I don’t mean extreme-bad, I mean poor-bad. The “filmmaker” is fetishistic about torturing his Messiah in a way that primarily makes me want to avoid sitting next to him on the bus while also having the exact opposite of its intended effect. Jesus is being scourged, and hunks of his skin are flapping in the wind, and then the soldiers say, “Switch weapons!” and they tag out at the ring, and then they scourge him some more, and just when it looks like he can’t possibly take any more they shout, “Okay, now turn him over and do the front!” Meanwhile, though, they have to wade through the blood in fishing boots and all I’m thinking is, “I don’t care if he could turn butter into margarine, he’d never stand up again if he lost that much blood, Mel.”
Worse still, it’s like The Book of John: Special Edition. Gibson invents about half a dozen never-before-seen hypothetical ways to hurt Jesus that weren’t in the original. If one of the Roman officers had said to his underlings, “Does this cross look sturdy to you? We’d better jump up and down on him for a minute or two, just to make sure,” it would have been completely consistent with the storytelling up to that point. Between that and the sound effects (they’re nailing him up! SQUISH! SPLORCH!) I was stifling laughter by the end of the movie.
Because unfortunately, all the extra, kinky Jesus hurting does is draw your attention to all the wrong things. There’s a scene where they’re trying to get the second nail to line up with a hole in the cross - and what Target bookshelf purchaser among us hasn’t had this problem? - but Jesus’ arms just aren’t long enough. So, being practical men, they just dislocate one of ‘em (with a nice loud crispity-crunchity Butterfinger crunch on the soundtrack). But ten minutes later, he’s up on the cross with so much slack that his hands are up over his head like he was atop Golgotha trying to start the wave or break into a chorus of “YMCA.”
These are not the things you notice when you’re watching a good movie.
Also - and I’m repeating myself - slow motion should be against the law.
And I haven’t even gotten to the part where the centurion pierces his side, and it’s like he has a lawn sprinkler living inside him. (The centurion is played by Uma Thurman in a track suit.) Or the way that, much like modern cartoon villains, ancient civilizations apparently liked to laugh uproariously for no reason when horrible things were happening. Crucifixion was, the film posits, the ancient equivalent of America’s Funniest Home Videos or Fox reality programming. I did not so much want to help Jesus as I wanted to approach a Roman and ask, “Exactly what about this makes you laugh? I find your reaction wildly inconsistent with human behavior” as fast as I could before they stoned me to death or something.
And Judas. . . ! His first appearance, when they throw his bag of silver to him from across the room and it spills at his feet (in slow motion) was the first time in the film when I said, “Ohhhh we’ve got trouble!” Sure enough, every scene he’s in is infused with ham-handed hand-wringing and completely inappropriate surreal imagery. When Andrew Lloyd Webber does better with a character than you do, it’s time to hang it up.
I think the entire spirit and content of the film can be summed up by the Crow Scene. As you may remember from Sunday school, one of the thieves being crucified along with Jesus mocks him for not just getting down off the cross. As soon as he does this in the film, a huge black crow lands on his cross and starts eating his face off, stabbing his eye out with its beak. When this happened, I thought, That’s the entire movie in a nutshell.
I realize that I may come across as somewhat irreverent, but nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, I have strong, very deeply held beliefs that I now have to re-explain to people because of this irredeemable piece of excrement. Every Christian in America is going to see it. (My girlfriend was delighted to hear a representative of my faith say on the radio, “Even non-Catholics will be able to understand it!” “Gee Jim,” she said to me, “I hope I’m able to follow the story of Christ even though I’m… Lutheran.”) The brilliance of this geek show’s marketing campaign is that it is designed to make Christians feel like they’re sinning if they don’t want to see the movie.
“I heard it’s really bad.”
“What’s the matter? Do you hate Jesus?”
“I like him more than you do; you’re the one who beat the #### out of him.”
(Not saying the profanity is easy. Not thinking it constantly is turning out to be much harder.)
The ironic thing (I think; I’m not even sure anymore; thanks for nothing, Alanis) is that the whole mess ends up achieving its goal in the most roundabout way possible. I found myself thinking about the crucifixion in ways I hadn’t considered, but primarily because my mind was wandering away from the tedium on the screen. “Yeah…. you know, they arrested Jesus at night, but they didn’t crucify him until midday the next day. So that whole night and morning, he was just sitting there waiting for it to be over. Much like I am now.” As my girlfriend later remarked, “It makes me want to go to church again immediately, just to better erase it from my memory.” Amen, sister. Amen.
II: when jesus donned the leather cassock, i almost lost it
Reactions to my review of The Passion have been beyond my grandest delusions. E-mails and phone calls the like of which I haven’t seen since I declared war on The Matrix back in aught three. In fact, Raukodraug’s Matrix comparison in the comments section (does anybody but me read those? I hope so) still makes me laugh out loud; I thought the last shot in the movie was one of the funniest because it reminded me so much of the last shot from The Matrix. For some reason, Jesus leaving the tomb was so reminiscent to me of Keanu leaving the phone booth, all that was missing was the Rage Against the Machine. They pan away from his burial shroud as it’s doing an Obi-Wan, and there he is, kind of going, “Yeah, that’s right,” and then as he struts out they pan down to his hand and the CGI hole through it…! I did not know what to say, so I chose to say “BOOOOOOO.” Much to my girlfriend’s consternation. Our rowmates were not septugenarians you wanted to run afoul of.
I know, I know there were shreds of silver lining in the movie. As I sat there, desperately trying to clutch onto a sliver of the positive experience I was eagerly planning to have when I went to this K of C S & M, there were one or two moments when I feebly thought, “There! That would be out of place in the worst movie ever. I would admit seeing a movie with that scene in it.” But when I try to focus on them, all I can think about is the tidal wave of hooey they were adrift in.
I didn’t even mention the Bridge Scene. Judas is being hounded by the Devil and Gollum and Jar Jar and Linda Blair (you may remember this scene from the Gospel According to No One) and so he’s hiding out in the dark. Meanwhile, Jesus is being led from Gethsemane in chains and repeatedly kicked in the bum bum. After one ill-placed kick too many, Jesus topples off of a bridge, but the guards are still holding his chains and so nnnng there he is painfully dangling like a hastily-hung chandelier off the side of the bridge railing. As luck would have it, like the Chili Peppers before him, Judas is under that very bridge, because really, where else would he be hiding in this movie? And Jesus, who appears nonplussed by having just been made into a sacramental pinata, shoots Judas a doleful stare as if to say, “And after all those times I drove you to the airport. After all those times I helped you move,” and Judas replies, “GAHHHH!” A thought came to me that was very reminiscent of when the Titanic was sinking and Leo Dicaprio was handcuffed to a pipe below deck: was the actual story not interesting enough? Was it not going to hold my attention without the addition of this Young Indiana Jones malarkey? Does the 15 minutes of lashing him with a mace not work without the bridge dangling? And as for the Judas component, well, I believe that ground is well-trod in the previous post.
Another regrettable choice which I am too bored to belabor: the portrayal of Barabbas as a slobbering snaggletoothed imbecile. I was taught that Barabbas was an insurgent, making the whole thing just a wee smidge more complicated. I got the point - the crowd would rather release an evil rapist John Belushi than Jesus! Ooh, that crowd makes me so mad! - but can there be no vestige of subtlety anywhere? You’re already portraying Pilate as a contemplative high school guidance counselor; does Barabbas actually have to be cross-eyed with flies buzzing around him like Pigpen? “Who do you choose, people of Israel? Jesus of Nazareth, or Mungo of the Drool People?”