It’s sobering that the Passion–which has after all furnished the themes and iconography for many of the greatest achievements in Western art–should be reduced to this sort of clinical and near-fascistic sanctimony. More sobering still is the way that most American believers have rushed to embrace The Passion of the Christ on the terms it presents itself, as a faithful, super-realistic account of the most critical episode in Western religious history. Far from being the greatest story ever told, Gibson’s film is the loudest command ever barked. And in heeding it so unthinkingly, most of the players who are stoking its unprecedented popular appeal–the media, the cynical culture warriors, and perhaps most grimly of all, the well-meaning moviegoing public–find themselves assigned bit parts in a spectacle that’s ultimately far more gladiatorial than gospel-minded. Thanks to this supremely cynical act of visual repackaging, Mel Gibson has performed his own sort of miracle, turning the vicarious identification with Jesus’ suffering into an expressionless bloodbath. In accepting this as a literal account of the Passion’s scourging truth, many an earnest believer bypasses the movie’s actual significance: the casual consignment of the West’s most powerful life-and-death spiritual drama to the inert, ever-mounting body count of our mass entertainments. Surely this cannot be what Jesus meant when he said he came to “bring not peace, but a sword.”
However static The Passion is schematically, many individual scenes possess vitality, oddity, poetry. The use of Aramaic and Latin saves the dialogue from the tonal gaffes even the most intelligent biblical movies lurch into. A world-class cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, The Natural), gives us a world seen by torchlight, so golden and so dank that you can well understand why the people in it yearn for messiahs, yet crucify them when they appear. His framing, too, is wonderful: when Simon of Cyrene stoops to relieve Jesus of his burden, the foreheads of the two men incline toward each other under the tilted cross, and a poignant communion hovers in the air. John Wright’s editing maintains the battering pace Gibson obviously wanted. The costumes actually look like clothes, and I can pay the designer, Maurizio Millenotti, no higher compliment than that.
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