From Action To Passion

Human Events, Mar 8, 2004 by Coombs, Marian Kester

Mel Gibson's Cinematic Masterpiece The Passion of the Christ From Action To Passion

Now we see. Mel Gibson, answering a call, did know what he was doing. And what he has done would wring blood from a heart of stone.

Before The Passion of the Christ was released, many critics of culture and society were sure it was not an inclusive, sensitive or multicultural subject to film; now they are sure it should not have been so violent, so bloody, or so "fixated" upon Christ's final agony.

But these criticisms ignore Precept No. 1 respecting art: "Ask not what the artist could or should have done, but what he has done in fact." Precept No. 2 is "Ask not what the artist says he intended, but what effect his work has upon the soul." With The Passion of the Christ, filmmaker Mel Gibson appears to have made exactly the film with exactly the effect he intended to make.

Above all he does not permit the viewer to escape the meaning of the Passion-prolonged, brutal physical and psychological suffering. The incessant rain of ugly blows upon Jesus of Nazareth at length seems to fall upon ourselves, the wails of the mourners mount to an unbearable screaming in our ears, the nails of the cross seem pounded into our own quivering nerves.

Jim Caviezel's beatific countenance and warm brown eyes, glimpsed fleetingly in shards of memory as the final hours play out, are all but extinguished at the hands of the temple mob and the Roman soldiers, while the gospel message conveyed in these sequences dwells upon Christ's looming self-sacrifice and its necessity: He must go where his friends cannot follow.

Caviezel clearly abandoned himself to this role in a way few actors are called upon to do. Of the other actors, none of whom strikes a false note, most haunting are the Bulgarian Hristo Shopov as Pilate and the Romanian Maia Morgenstern as Mary. Italy contributes a palette of Mediterranean faces and landscapes. The tragedy unfolds, "in fulfillment of the prophecy," and all including the Christ are caught up in it, struggle as they may.

The music with its choral swells and ebbs matches the nerve-shearing effect of the cruel road to Calvary, but even more arresting is the resurrection of two extinct languages, "low" Latin and Aramaic, an ancient Hebrew dialect, made miraculously to flow again from the mouths of living people.

If this resurrection were all Gibson had accomplished, it would be brilliant enough. But with this film, he has delivered a second staggering blow to Western culture's many enemies. The first was delivered by The Lord of the Rings, based as it is on the contentious notion that the civilization of Europe is beautiful, noble and spiritually peerless. Like The Passion, Peter Jackson's trilogy reanimates the central life-giving "story" of the peoples of the West.

By destroying the Ring of Power, Frodo saves the Shire, but not for himself; as he explains, "It must often be so, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them." Frodo too must go in the end where his friends cannot follow.

This year's sweep of the Oscars by a "fantasy" movie so alien to the tastes and mores of Hollywood raises the fascinating possibility that next year the Academy might be forced to acknowledge the power of the unadorned Christian message.

Critics have tried to dismiss The Passion as typical Gibson martyr-complex, sneering that ever since the actor counterfeited the death of William Wallace in Braveheart he has been enamored of grisly, tortured ends.

But such are scarcely unique to the Gibson opus. It is hard to think of any male action star who doesn't routinely sustain a terrific beating onscreen: Pierce Brosnan, Sylvester Stallone, Kevin Costner, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude van Damme, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise (Vanilla Sky, Minority Report and The Last Samurai, to name a few) spring to mind.

In action movies the hero's job description is to take that beating, skillfully dam a reservoir of audience pity and rage, and then release it in an orgy of retributive vengeance. But in The Passion, no such release comes. Those who did such shameful, terrible things to an innocent man 2,000 years ago were not punished-they are still here, up to their old tricks. They are us.

"Father, forgive them," gasps the dying man. The sky darkens, the earth trembles, the mourners flee, the devil shrieks from its pit.

And what a devil is this one. In appearance, Gibson's Satan owes some debt to Ingmar Bergman's death. Satan here is conceived as a cloaked, pale, hairless woman with the cold voice of a man; the unnatural combination is chilling. It counsels despair in Gethsemane, it glides amid the mob and the Sanhedrin, it rejoices to mingle with the bestial soldiers of Rome.

God does not appear save in the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, in the force that keeps him alive through torment that would have killed an ordinary man, in the strength that allows him to cry to his sobbing mother, "Behold, how I make all things new!"