The Passion of the Christ?

By Darren Guy

The Passion of the Christ is a shocking and intense film, capturing its audience from start to finish, not because it has a fast moving storyline but mainly because its sheer brutality keeps you glued to your chair. There is a beautiful, misty, dark atmospheric scene at the beginning where Jesus (Jim Caviezel) is alone in the garden of Gethsemane awaiting his fate. Not only are his disciples fast asleep all around him - while Judas (Luco Lionello) is receiving his twenty pieces of silver) - but beside Jesus in his most tormented and weakest moment is Satan (Rosalinda Celentano). And although JC is struggling to come to terms with his father “forsaking” him, Lucifer is there to remind him in his moment of intense loneliness that there is an easy way out. And well the rest is history, shall we say. The guards arrive, Judas kisses him, his disciples put up very little resistance and he is taken off as we the audience are dragged through scene after scene of beatings and torture, as punches, kicks and whippings rain down on him from his arrest right through to when he is nailed on the cross. Mel Gibson has certainly not spared the audience; he has even used his artistic licence to lay the torture and beatings on thicker than any biblical account.

One of the strengths of the film is in its ordinary and realistic portrayal of the period, with its effective use of scenery, camera shots and the authentic use of Hebrew and Aramaic there are even occasions during the torture of Jesus when he seems almost mortal, though the scenes with Satan and the occasional aerial shots (meant to be God looking down) were corny to say the least. All in all I found it difficult to understand the point of the film. Was Catholic multi-millionaire Gibson trying to ravage us into guilt, like a loony nun or priest shouting at us about how Jesus suffered for our sins? Was the point of it to try and get us all running back to the church falling to our knees and praying for forgiveness and mercy? If that was the reason then personally speaking it failed for many reasons. Firstly I only found a few characters believable - Jesus, Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov) and Caiphas (Mattia Sbragia), the rest of the cast seemed plastic and cowardly, even the actions of the Madonna (Maia Morgenstern) were unbelievable. I also found the film devoid of any political and moral content. Where were Jesus’ statements? Where was the Sermon on the Mount? The attack on the moneylenders in the house of God? His statements about the powerful and wealthy? The film suggested that Jesus was only executed because he had blasphemed, not for the reasons which might be more sensitive (at least for Gibson and his Hollywood chums): that Jesus died because he stood up for the poor against the powerful. Throughout the film words kept coming into my head – words like ‘hypocrisy’. I wondered why most Christians remain conveniently silent about the thousands of people languishing in prisons across the world today, being tortured at least as brutally as Jesus through modern methods, on the orders of the powerful. Why? They too stand up and speak out against the powerful and wealthy in the interests of the poor. It is those ones still alive we should be thinking about when watching this film - it didn’t just happened then it happens now, and it’s carried out by the same type of people. But maybe that is my wrath.