Disclaimer: Before I get started, I'd like to establish that my opinion of this movie has no bearing on my opinion of Jesus or of Christianity or even of other movies about Jesus and Christianity -- I consider Zeffirelli's Gospel-loyal Jesus of Nazareth miniseries to be one of the best in the history of television.
All right. On with the review.
My friends and I managed to see The Passion of the Christ with a packed theater of churchgoers. The church had bought out the theater, but not everybody showed up, so they gave us the extra tickets. Before the movie started, the pastor read aloud from Scripture and told us that what we were about to see would enrich our relationship with Christ.
Unfortunately, The Passion didn't enrich my relationship with Christ. It didn't enrich anything. It was a mean-spirited, unendurable bloodbath -- as devoid of meaning as it was of cinematic style.
Director Mel Gibson was attempting to convey the horrors Jesus had to suffer when he was crucified. The problem, however, is that this suffering ultimately doesn't mean anything to us as moviegoers, because Gibson doesn't make any real attempt to establish the character of Jesus or the reason he had to die for our sins.
Sure, we get occasional brief flashbacks of Jesus' ministry, but only in snippets. Gibson isn't interested in Jesus' message of love and tolerance. He's only interested in one thing, which is blood.
Remember the torture scene at the end of Braveheart in which Gibson's character is savagely torn to pieces? Imagine those 10 minutes stretched into two interminable hours, except jam-packed with twice as much blood per capita. Now you have some idea of the treacherous, largely unrewarding experience that is The Passion of the Christ.
Stylistically, Gibson shoots the torture with much of the same dull technique with which he shot the Braveheart torture -- slow motion shots with sad, sweeping music in lieu of sound effects. But Braveheart works better because we know who the movie version of William Wallace is. He's real to us, and thus, seeing him tortured elicits our sympathy.
Gibson's version of Jesus, on the other hand, is one of the most undeveloped protagonists I've ever seen. Many will say the reason for this is that everybody going to the movie already knows about Jesus, but is this true? There are countless interpretations of Jesus. It is irresponsible to assume that we, as a pluralistic audience, will have already agreed going into the movie who Jesus is and what his life was like.
The fact is, there isn't much storytelling in The Passion. It's just a panorama of fetishistic flesh-tearing and gore, cut together with a series of almost comically synoptic flashbacks, which touch briefly upon our favorite Gospel moments like a Jesus' greatest hits collection without any discernible motivation.
On the bright side, the cinematography is often incredibly picturesque, and the makeup department does a brilliant job, I suppose, of caking Christ in blood. But these few technical achievements are obscured by Gibson's relentless obsession with making us feel every crack of every whip. This isn't a movie. It's masochism.
