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Articles
> The Power and the Glory of Mel Gibson’s
“The
Passion of the Christ”
The Power and the Glory of Mel Gibson’s
“The
Passion of the Christ”
ROME, February 15, 2004
I received a phone call from my colleague,
Delia Gallagher, at about noontime yesterday: “They’re
screening Mel Gibson’s
film at Cinecitta this afternoon, and we’re
invited.”
 We
took the metro from "Ottaviano," near the Vatican,
to Cinecitta, Rome's "Hollywood"; it's a straight
shot, no changes.
We stood in front of the entrance, bought a sandwich and
a candy bar at a kiosk. A cold February wind blew.
Father Thomas Williams, an American priest and Dean of Theology
for the Legionary of Christ seminary in Rome, came up out
of the metro with two other Americans in tow. We greeted each
other and walked into Cinecitta ("Cinema City").
Vittorio Messori, arguably Italy's leading Catholic journalist,
was there to view the film and write a review for Italy's
leading daily, Corriere della Sera.
Father Augustine Di Noia, an American official at the Vatican's
chief doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, was there.
And so was the wife of Judas... the wife of the Italian actor
who plays Judas in the film.
There were about 12 of us in all in the screening room.
"The film arrived this morning from America," Father
Williams said. "This is the first showing in Italy, and
one of the first showings in the world, of the final edited
version. It's film now, not digital. What we will see is the
film which will open in America in 10 days."
The lights dimmed. The film began.
I wept.
I wept for the implacable inevitability of the suffering
and death of Jesus Christ, the ruin of his body, which, yes,
is presented as the temple of God, but which reminded me of
my own body, of my sons' bodies -- how many times I have bandaged
their little, and not-so-little, cuts! -- of the bodies of
soldiers and civilians being blown apart in Iraq... and in
Israel... of the bodies of millions in the past century...
of the bodies of those who suffered and died in the concentration
camps...
It is a violent film.
So violent that I wanted to turn away.
So violent that I wanted to say, "Mel, you went too
far..."
But it is a violent world.
It is a violent world where the dignity of human beings is
violated and ground down in a way that all of us see, and
most of us grow accustomed to, though we ought not to...
The overwhelming sense I took from Gibson's film was of man's
senseless brutality toward man.
Toward this one man.
Toward this carpenter from Nazareth, this Jesus.
Toward all men.
This film is a brutal depiction of brutal behavior which
asks all of us -- Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, all
of us -- to cease such behavior, because it is cruel, because
it is heartless, because it is against God's will for us not
to have hearts...
In this sense, the film is not and cannot be anti-Semitic.
There is no subtitle in the film in which the Jewish high
priest, Caiaphas, or anyone else, says "Let his blood
be upon us and upon our children."
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Mary
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is splendid.
It is her sorrow that made me weep.
She reminded me of my wife, watching over our sons.
She reminded me of all mothers, who see their sons falling
out of their hands into the hands of the world, the hands
of men.
Her face is iconic, almost expressionless.
Her face is the most expressive I have ever seen.
She stares into the camera, into our own eyes, and her sorrow
for her son fills us with sorrow.
But there is something else. She is... not serene, serenity
would be too strong a word. She is... not accepting, no not
exactly accepting, she is not "accepting" her son's
brutal beating and crucifixion. She is partaking... sharing...
"co-bearing." Perhaps that's the best word: she
is bearing together with Jesus, her son, every blow, every
humiliation.
It is extraordinary to see, perhaps the most extraordinary
thing in the movie.
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The Devil
A face appears.
Who is that? We don't know. It seems a person, some character
not named. Expressionless.
Wait... is that evil in the expression? Or am I mistaken...
No, there is no expression, no flicker of eyes or tensing
of lips, no expression at all. So there is no evil, nothing
sinister. It's okay.
Then, suddenly.. through the mists in the garden of Gethsemane,
this haunting, haunted face begins to tempt and accuse Jesus,
and so we realize it IS the devil.
A shiver of recognition.
The devil has no horns, but is horrific.
No actions... but is the motive force of pure evil behind
all the acts of cruelty that spill out onto the screen, into
our faces.
A brilliant performance.
During the struggle in the garden to arrest Jesus, his eye
is struck. From that moment until the end of the film -- except
in flashbacks -- one eye is black and shut.
I hated that. I wanted to see his whole face more, both his
eyes. I think: "I wish Mel had waited until the middle
of the film to strike Jesus' eye..."
And then I think: "What a foolish thing to wish..."
In this final version of the film, there are a couple of
"flashbacks" added that were not in previous versions.
That's good.
I wanted more flashbacks.
During the scourging, I longed for a flashback, anything
to bring us back to a time when things were good, when Jesus
was living with his parents, or when he was preaching.
But Mel has decided to leave us only a couple of glimpses
of those happier times.
And one such moment, when Jesus splashes water on his mother,
then gives her a kiss, is the happiest moment in the film.
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Music
In some earlier screenings, there was no music at all. In
some, the musical score was still provisional.
In this final version, it is powerful, at times hypnotic,
riveting.
The intermixture of choral and instrumental is at times majestic.
Once, I wanted to stop my ears, as Jesus falls on the Via
Dolorosa, and the whips of the soldiers lash him, and the
music comes out in a staccato, like machine guns, like monkeys
pounding coconuts on tree-trunks in the jungle.
I wanted it all to stop...
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The Languages
The use of Latin -- yes, I could understand the Latin dialogue,
or at least a bit of it -- and of Aramaic, distinguishes this
film from all previous films about Jesus.
I thought it worked.
In fact, it began to seem so natural to me that 2,000 years
seemed to condense, like an accord ian, and Jerusalem of the
time of Christ began to seem a bit like Rome today, or New
York, or Moscow. It didn't seem so far.
It is said that people who speak Arabic and Hebrew may be
able to follow some of the Aramaic dialogue (indeed, some
believe the film may have an unexpected impact among Jews
and Muslims precisely for this reason); I could not.
But I thought it was brilliantly done. Others may find errors
in pronunciation or vocabulary, but for me it was convincing,
and powerful.
This was a choice Gibson made and stuck to against all sorts
of criticism ("the film will be a flop if you do it in
Latin and Aramaic; are you crazy?"). I think he was right;
it is one of the most extraordinary and powerful aspects of
this film.
Before the film began, the Italian producer, who was also
present at our screening, said that, though he was a Catholic,
he had never really understood the Catholic Mass until he
saw this film.
There is no doubt that there is a "eucharistic"
dimension to this film, which makes it more profoundly "religious"
or Christian -- but also Jewish, as I will explain in a minute
-- than any other film about Christ's passion.
Gibson accomplishes this by setting the moment of the nailing
of the cross, the moment of the crucifixion, in which the
body of Jesus is finally broken, against a flashback in which
he is about the break the bread at the Last Supper, which
was a Passover seder. The meaning is clear: the bread broken
at the Passover meal, which Jesus says "is my body"
is the body which is being crucified.
This is of course the central action of every Catholic Mass
-- the Last Supper is commemorated, and the death of Christ
on the cross is "mystically" (that is, truly but
not in a physical way visible to us here and now) both recalled
and re-enacted. The theology of this is of course a matter
of dispute, especially between Protestants and Catholics,
but also between traditional and progressive Catholics.
Gibson, in my view, has expressed in this film the theology
of his own traditional Catholic belief: that what happened
2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, at the Last Supper and on the
cross, happens today, mystically, at a Catholic Mass.
The film is "eucharistic" -- a depiction of the
religious sacrifice which constitutes, in Catholic belief,
the initiation of a new world, redeemed from sin, a world
of eternal life.
It is in this sense that the film is also very Jewish --
which will seem a surprising statement to some who have followed
the polemics over this film.
The film is informed by and infused with the Jewish concept
of sacrificial atonement -- the "sacrificial goat"
or "scapegoat" was of course part of Jewish religious
practice during the time of the Temple sacrifices.
This is why Gibson chooses to introduce the final phase of
the film with a "divine tear" -- a teardrop shed
by God.
The little sphere of water fills the screen and falls to
earth at the moment of Jesus' death.
A great wind roars, the soldiers, who are breaking the leg
bones of the two thieves, so that their bodies sag and they
die of suffocation, flee -- after one pierces Jesus in the
side with his spear to make sure he is truly dead, and water
from his lungs gushes out, mixed with a stream of blood, though
never breaking his legs -- and in the Temple, the veil over
the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary, is rent.
Certainly there is a polemic here with Judaism, or with one
form of or stage in Judaism, which some might say is the sole
form.
But there is no "anti-Semitism." Theologians, and
simple believers, will have to grapple with the relationship
between Jesus -- who is thoroughly Jewish, and surrounded
by Jewish followers -- and Judaism, but there is no question
of denying the very Jewish tradition which produced Jesus.
It is the soil out of which Jesus -- and this film -- grows.
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The Resurrection
One hates to give away the ending of a film, but in this
case the ending is widely known.
Christ rises.
His risen body is no longer ruined, though his hands still
bear the marks of the nails that were pounded through them
so ferociously (by Gibson himself, by the way -- Gibson's
only appearance in the film is as the man hammering the nails
into Christ's hands).
I read Gibson's ending, as Christ strides forth, as the beginning
of the 2,000 years that have since passed. I see it from the
Catholic perspective, as the beginning of the Church, a "mystical"
human society, animated by a risen spirit, this Christ who
was crucified, at the center of history, giving meaning to
history -- but not ending history.
And the polemics over this film are part of that still unfolding
history.
In a few days, barring a cataclysm, the film will be in theaters,
and millions will see it.
And millions will weep.
But that weeping will not be channeled into hatred of any
group or groups; rather, it will be channeled into a renewed
commitment to the central message of the man who is depicted
suffering in this film: "Love one another."
- Dr. Robert Moynihan
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