While I haven’t yet …

While I haven’t yet seen “The Passion of the Christ”, I read the NY Times review of it rather incredulously. Typically when one reviews a movie based on a book, being familiar with the book itself is helpful. (Imagine something like, “I’ve never read Tolkien, but these ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies don’t make me want to. Bilbo just happens to find a ring in the middle of a mountain? How did he get there? Why was he there? Where’s the backstory?”) While Mr. A. O. Scott seems to have a passing knowledge of the big picture, some of his statements contradict that assumption. And even his own views seem to be in conflict with themselves.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To be honest, you’ll find that I agree with much of what Mr. Scott has to say about the story itself and how he describes the presentation of that story. Yet you’ll also find that we come to vastly different conclusions.

Please note that I’ve not copied each and every sentence of the review here, even though a good portion of it is. The link above will take you there, but I did want to say at the outset that Mr. Scott’s words, in italics below, are not all of what he said, only those on which I wanted to comment.

I have to quote in full the first couple of paragraphs to set the stage, because the opinion he’s expounding here is brought up specifically again at the end, but also in different forms throughout the review.

Good and Evil Locked in Violent Showdown
By A. O. SCOTT

There is a prophetic episode of “The Simpsons” in which the celebrity guest star Mel Gibson, directing and starring in a remake of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” enlists the help of Homer Simpson, who represents the public taste (or lack of it). Homer persuades Mr. Gibson to change the picture’s ending, replacing James Stewart’s populist tirade with an action sequence, a barrage of righteous gunfire that leaves the halls of Congress strewn with corpses. The audience flees the theater in disgust. I thought of Homer more than once, with an involuntary irreverence conditioned by many years of devotion to “The Simpsons,” as Mr. Gibson presented his new movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” to carefully selected preview audiences across the land, making a few last-minute cuts, and then taking to the airwaves to promote and defend the film. It opens on Wednesday nationwide.

Given the Crucifixion story, Mr. Gibson did not need to change the ending.

Keep that last sentence in mind. We’ll be back.

“The Passion of the Christ” is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it.

I would agree, and to a very real extent, I would hope that it assaults the spirits of those watching it. Christ’s death was our wrath visited upon him. For the Christian, there will be an uplifting of the spirit when we consider that he did this for us, while at the same time realizing that this “documentary”, as it were, actually documents the consequences of our own actions. The sins we commit caused this. This may be an assault on the spirit, but only because that is the essence of this story. The Gospel accounts of the crucifixion are an assault on our pride, our dishonesty, our immorality. But if you don’t realize why this assault on the spirit is happening, you don’t reap the benefits. In short, your spirit will be lifted up more than by any other story if you recognize the assault for what it is.

By Mr. Scott’s standard, then, the movie succeeds. It’s just that the uplifting of the spirit is more up to him than to Mr. Gibson.

Mr. Gibson has constructed an unnerving and painful spectacle that is also, in the end, a depressing one.

That is to say, there is no Hollywood ending to make you feel good about yourself just the way you are. Wouldn’t that be changing the ending?

It is disheartening to see a film made with evident and abundant religious conviction that is at the same time so utterly lacking in grace.

Depends on how you use the word “grace“. If by that he means “seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement, form, or proportion” or many of the other definitions, you are correct. But then again we’re talking about a crucifixion and a look at human nature, not The Nutcracker. However, if, by the word “grace”, he means “divine love and protection bestowed freely on people”, then this movie depicts the epitome of grace, of divine love bestowed freely.

We see which definition Mr. Scott prefers next:

Mr. Gibson has departed radically from the tone and spirit of earlier American movies about Jesus, which have tended to be palatable (if often extremely long) Sunday school homilies designed to soothe the audience rather than to terrify or inflame it.

Again, I’m going to agree with Mr. Scott on this, but then I see this as a positive rather than a negative. Donald Sensing has a very in-depth posting on this very subject that Christians, and people reviewing Christian films, ought to read with regard to the “palatable” Jesus vs. the battling Jesus that we see in the Gospels. The Good Shepherd ain’t no wimp. The battle between good and evil isn’t as simple as Star Wars and almost never graceful. Finally a film is portraying it as it truly is. If this is terrifying, it ought to be.

His version of the Gospels is harrowingly violent…

So are Matthew’s, Mark’s, Luke’s and John’s. They weren’t writing a screenplay, of course, so some details are not there, but also they knew their audience. For example, when the Gospels say that Jesus was scourged, the folks back then knew what that meant. Mr. Scott almost blames the movie for defining that word for this generation’s edification:

Once he is taken into custody, Jesus (Jim Caviezel) is cuffed and kicked and then, much more systematically, flogged, first with stiff canes and then with leather whips tipped with sharp stones and glass shards.

Scourging was “harrowingly violent”, so yet again I must agree with Mr. Scott that his review is accurate and reflects the accounts as written. I do hope he doesn’t consider this a “Bad Thing”.

The audience’s desired response to this spectacle is not revulsion, but something like the cowering, quivering awe manifested by Mary (Maia Morgenstern), Mary Magdalen (Monica Bellucci) and a few sensitive Romans and Jerusalemites as they force themselves to watch. Disgust and awe are not, when you think about it, so far apart, and in Mr. Gibson’s vision one is a route to the other.

And that is, I believe, one of the main reasons Mr. Gibson made this movie. For too long the cross has been presented in too much a sanitary manner. The four words “Jesus died for you” have no meaning without context. The early Church knew what that meant. We’ve forgotten it. Christian and non-Christian alike should know what this really means before they embrace or dismiss Jesus. He didn’t just die, he suffered as well, with each lash of the whip being just as much a part of the penalty paid for us as his ultimate death. Reminding us of that will be disgusting, but the individual who embraces his sacrifice will be given that sense of awe when the realization hits that all this was done for that individual as much as for anyone else.

By rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus’ death and fixing our eyes on every welt and gash on his body, this film means to make literal an event that the Gospels often treat with circumspection and that tends to be thought about somewhat abstractly. Look, the movie seems to insist, when we say he died for our sins, this is what we mean.

And again, for the original readers of the Gospels, circumspection was good enough. They knew what was meant. So if I may predict thoughts, I daresay that Mr. Gibson’s primary reason for making the movie is embodied in that last sentence. Never mind “the movie seems to insist”; I think that’s its whole reason for existence.

To halt the execution would thwart divine providence and refuse the gift of redemption.

Anyway, this is a film review, not Sunday school. The paradox of wishing something horrible to stop even as you want it to continue has as much to do with moviegoing as with theology. And Mr. Gibson, either guilelessly or ingeniously, has exploited the popular appetite for terror and gore for what he and his allies see as a higher end. The means, however, are no different from those used by virtuosos of shock cinema like Quentin Tarantino and Gaspar Noé, who subjected Ms. Bellucci to such grievous indignity in “Irréversible.” Mr. Gibson is temperamentally a more stolid, less formally adventurous filmmaker, but he is no less a connoisseur of violence, and it will be amusing to see some of the same scolds who condemned Mr. Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” sing the praises of “The Passion of the Christ.”

Well we can partially thank Hollywood for the appetite for terror and gore. Had someone made this movie in the 1940s, it would have had a very different look to it, to be sure. In order to get the point across in today’s environment, one has to speak today’s language. But unlike a fictional movie where blood and guts come from a writer’s imagination or a director’s preference, the violence in this movie is basically a retelling of events as they happened. And even more so that in other historical movies, the violence visited upon Jesus, in a sense, is the story, because to the Christian, what was done to him is both because of us and is what saves us.

Thus there is no real discrepancy among those who disapprove of gratuitous violence while praising “The Passion of the Christ”. There is a very real difference, although to many of this generation’s moviegoers that difference may be lost on them.

We’ll skip some of Mr. Scott’s review of the style and tone (especially since it gave away an element of the movie I’d preferred to have been surprised about, so I won’t spoil it for you), but I will mention that when he says, “But the style and tone of “The Passion” are far from what is ordinarily meant by realism”, I get a good chuckle, considering what much of Hollywood calls “based on a true story”.

Is “The Passion of the Christ” anti-Semitic? I thought you’d never ask. To my eyes it did not seem to traffic explicitly or egregiously in the toxic iconography of historical Jew hatred, but more sensitive viewers may disagree. The Pharisees, in their tallit and beards, are certainly shown as a sinister and inhumane group, and the mob they command is full of howling, ugly rage. But this on-screen villainy does not seem to exceed what can be found in the source material.

Thanks to Mr. Scott for noticing. Again, this has much more attention to the “source material” than most Hollywood offerings, I would contend.

Mr. Gibson a few weeks ago reportedly expunged an especially provocative line of dialogue that referred to the Jews: “His blood be on us, and on our children.” That line comes from the Book of Matthew, and it would take a revisionist to remove every trace of controversy and intolerance from a story that rests squarely on the theological boundary separating Christianity from Judaism.

More thanks to Mr. Scott for wishing to put aside revisionism.

That Mr. Gibson did not attempt to transcend these divisions may be regrettable, ..

Wait, I just thought he said it would take a revisionist to ignore them.

but to condemn “The Passion of the Christ” for its supposed bigotry is to miss its point and to misstate its problems. The troubling implications of the film do not arise primarily from its religious agenda: an extreme, traditionalist Roman Catholicism that has not prevented “The Passion” from resonating, oddly enough, with many evangelical Protestants.

A hearty “Amen” to bringing the two together on a subject they agree upon. Once again, not a Bad Thing.

What makes the movie so grim and ugly is Mr. Gibson’s inability to think beyond the conventional logic of movie narrative.

There’s that “source material” problem. God needs better writers, eh?

In most movies – certainly in most movies directed by or starring Mr. Gibson – violence against the innocent demands righteous vengeance in the third act, an expectation that Mr. Gibson in this case whips up and leaves unsatisfied.

Forgiveness of sins leaves one unsatisfied? Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Would it have been better to have Jesus, after rising from the dead, give the Romans and the High Priest a good, old-fashioned smiting? From what I’ve heard, there is either a resurrection scene or a reference to it in the movie, but apparently that’s not good enough. The ending, according to the “source material”, is what it is, the art of scriptwriting notwithstanding. Would Mr. Scott have wished it to be changed?

(Oh, and the third act, while it has been written, hasn’t been played out yet. See Revelation 20 for the “righteous vengeance” part, and further on for the upside.)

On its own, apart from whatever beliefs a viewer might bring to it, “The Passion of the Christ” never provides a clear sense of what all of this bloodshed was for, an inconclusiveness that is Mr. Gibson’s most serious artistic failure.

Go back to the “source material”. It’s all there. And I suspect that, too, is part of what Mr. Gibson is encouraging by making this film.

The Gospels, at least in some interpretations, suggest that the story ends in forgiveness. But such an ending seems beyond Mr. Gibson’s imaginative capacities. Perhaps he suspects that his public prefers terror, fury and gore. Maybe Homer Simpson was right after all.

Or maybe Mr. Scott would like a revisionist ending, contrary to any of his protestations. The problem is, the story of Jesus’ life isn’t simple, isn’t neatly packaged, and is frankly not all that sanitary. Early on in this review, Mr. Scott said “Mr. Gibson did not need to change the ending”, and now says that the ending ought to be “forgiveness”. Yet the violence he decries here is, in fact, the conduit for that forgiveness. I have to wonder what Mr. Scott would consider to be the real ending.

“The cross is rated ‘R'”, so my pastor said a couple weeks ago, and so for the first time in his life he’s recommending an ‘R’-rated movie. The cross is disturbing, offensive and, for those of us who realize that we ourselves are characters in this movie, terrifying. Mel Gibson has nothing to apologize for. Hopefully, the message of this movie will get us apologizing to God and to each other for our sins against both.

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