Review: The Passion of the Christ

Despite newspaper articles in the Clarion-Ledger claiming that every Jackson showing of The Passion of the Christ would be sold out today, I easily procured tickets to a 12:45 screening.

In a theatre designed to seat about 250 people, I’d guess only about a quarter of the seats were taken. Mostly due to the time of day, the crowd seemed to consist mainly of older couples, small groups of women, and the occasional solo male.

We saw no trailers before The Passion. After the cheesy, animated rollercoaster ride through space-bound concessions that Regal Cinemas screens before every feature, we plunged directly into the darkness of the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus is immediately betrayed and arrested. Beatings begin. Beatings continue for the next 100 minutes. We see much splashing of gore; at one point, we actually see gibbering Roman soldiers, their grinning faces spattered with blood, using a cat o’ nine tails to peel realistic strips of meat from Jesus’ bare back.

We are, at times, convinced the movie cannot possibly become more violent — and then it does. We think the Romans are moving to release a whimpering Jesus from the whipping post; instead, they roll Jesus over and begin flaying his chest and stomach. Then the whip snags an eyeball.

The blood-slimed walk to Golgoltha is rendered in nauseating detail. (Jesus falls once … twice … three times.) The crucifixion sequence amounts to a gruesome illustrated textbook of Roman execution; the camera lingers on the spikes being driven into Jesus’ flesh even as the Dolby Surround speakers reverberate with the sound of splintering bone.

Jesus dies. Satan cries out. Darkness falls. For perhaps six seconds, we glimpse a resurrected Jesus, oddly unscarred except for holes in his hand the size of quarters.

The end.

The Passion of the Christ should have been titled An Extremely Graphic Depiction of One Man’s Cruel and Grisly Execution. Though most critics will be afraid to say so (Roger Ebert, for example, gives The Passion four stars), as a movie — as a story — this feature is an utter failure.

Characters appear, without setup or backstory. They act, but we have no insight into or knowledge of their motivations. They appear to have relationships with each other, but we do not see these begin or develop. The characters themselves are one-dimensional, the sort of characters who can be described with two-word summaries: tearful followers, sorrowful mother, smarmy priests, blood-thirsty Romans, yammering crowds, suffering Christ.

Despite the exquisite sets and georgous photography, the movie iteself, then, does not possess the engaging characters or the dramatic structure needed to evoke a genuine emotional response. The result? Any empathy, any sympathy — indeed, any emotion, other than revulsion — that we feel during this film must be manufactured from our own foreknowlege of the events depicted onscreen.

The people around me did this — perhaps a bit too eagerly. Several wept bitterly and audibly. Some staggered from the theatre as though they, themselves, had been beaten. One group of three women stood just outside the door, blocking the exit, clutching each other. “I’m just speechless,” their tear-soaked leader gasped again and again. “Speechless. Utterly speechless.”

I heard several folks murmur, “If the entire world could see this movie, they would have to accept Jesus as their personal Savior. They’d just have to.”

Respectfully, I disagree.

Imagine walking into a movie with absolutely no foreknowledge of what the film will be about. The curtain rises. A criminal is arrested and beaten. A mock trial is held. He’s well-composed, despite the circumstances, but you’ve no idea whether or not the accusations against him are true. For the next 100 minutes, he is mercilessly tortured before your eyes. In the end, he dies. The final scene, lasting only seconds, suggests he may actually have survived.

What’s the point? What’s the message? What’s the lesson?

Frankly, to anyone not already familiar with and deeply engaged by the Christ story, The Passion will be a pointless exercise in brutality. There is no Gospel here … only gore. There is no promise … only pain.

Which makes me even more uncomfortable about another fact: today’s screening was attended by several dozen children, from babes in arms to wide-eyed pre-teens. One very young girl screamed repeatedly and audibly asked to leave; her mother did not comply. Others, leaving the theatre, looked pale and shaken.

Had Mel Gibson produced the snuff flick I described three paragraphs earlier, fundamentalist Christians would be demanding his crucifixion. Had any other movie featured this level of gore and violence, fundamentalist Christians would be picketing the cinemas.

Because this movie has the word Christ in the title, they’re bringing the kids.

Watching this film in Jackson, Mississippi, is an experience in itself.

The two people behind me played a bizarre kind of “Passion Jeopardy” throughout the movie, loudly noting anytime the film departed from their beliefs about What Really Happened.

Satan appears in the Garden, complete with maggots squirming in his/her left nostril, and releases a snake that attacks Jesus. “Didn’t happen.”

Peter cuts off the ear of a Roman centurion. “That’s only in Matthew.”

Mary presses her ear to the street above Jesus’ cell and shares a sort of psychic moment with him. “Not in the Bible.”

Devil children with bug eyes chase Judas. “What’s all this?” Judas hangs himself. “Bible says he fell and broke open. Wonder if they’ll show that.” (They didn’t. Heaven knows why — they showed everything else.)

Another man, the fellow on my left, got a special thrill each time an actor uttered an Aramaic word he recognized. “Adonai,” he would repeat excitedly. “It means Lord.” He did this the first time the word was used … and every time after … in other words, several dozen times.

A man on the front row captured selected clips — and played them back, with the audio turned up loud — on his video-capable cell phone.

A particularly large, loud woman arrived half-way through with six small children in tow. She had to chase several of them down — they kept wandering the aisles. She spanked one of them often; the shrieks blended in completely with the soundtrack of the movie. Within thirty minutes, every seat around her was empty.

An older gentleman two rows back tilted his head back and snored. Loudly.

When I was a kid, I remember a phase during which preachers at our local Churches of Christ became obsessed with the grisly details of the crucifixion. We had become hardened to the crucifixion story, they said — we were not sufficiently emotional about it, or we would be far more dedicated to Jesus.

This led to a particularly gruesome series of sermons in which pulpit ministers showed off their detailed technical knowledge of the art of crucifixion. They brought in railroad spikes. They talked about the impact of driving a spike between the bones of the wrist. (“The meat of the palm,” one preacher intoned, “would not be able to support the body’s weight, so they had to drive the spike through solid bone.”)

During one youth rally, they turned out the lights and put on a shadow box play. Actors behind a white, backlit screen pantomimed the action described by a taped narrator. During the crucifixion, they pounded real spikes into wood as the actor playing Jesus screamed in agony. Young girls wept; one almost fainted.

In a tradition starved for emotion, this sort of carnival fascination with the grisly details of Jesus’ death proved especially effective. We were used to sitting in our pews, numbed by yet another sermon elucidating the Five Steps to Salvation. Suddenly, we felt something, and we were excited about it.

And that, I think, is what’s happening as people watch The Passion. Numbed by attending multi-million-dollar McChurches where the fitness center gets more attention than the altar, the audience, confronted with raw violence and explicit gore, feels something. This excites them, because they want to feel something … they crave a transcendent experience.

In the end, at least down here in the Bible Belt, The Passion is far less about the Gospel than it is about the desperate need to partake in a deeply emotional, visceral experience. Having bled all the mystery from their blocky, sterile temples, they come to the cool darkness of the local multiplex in hopes of feeling some connection with the divine.