On Screen

...Gibson put Latin into the mouths of his soldiers to recall famous lines from the Vulgate, but in fact the Romans of first century Palestine spoke Greek...

...He instructs his flock not only to love their neighbors, but their foes as well...

...They pull out more savage implements of torture and attack him with whips whose nail-pointed tips rip into the flesh of his hack...

...What, then, does this raw, contradictory film affirm...

...As if to emphasize the phoniness of the torture, the director consistently lapses into slow motion, yanking the viewer out of the reality of normal space and time...

...It has been said that Americans always get the President they deserve...

...The camera tilts down to his hand to reveal the only remaining mark of the Romans' scourging, a hole in his palm, the sign of stigmata...

...The emphasis of agony over grace is Gibson's contribution to the genre of films about the life of Jesus Christ...

...It suggests that the Jews, like the Germans in Schindler's List, were indeed responsible for the atrocities represented in the film...

...Though he often spoke playfully, with the irreverent Hollywood smugness that has kept him at the top of box office charts for two decades, he made it known that his creation of this movie was the fulfillment of a sacred task...

...Although Gibson pays meticulous attention to the physique of his hero, it is impossible to believe that any human being could be beaten so hideously—let alone lose so much blood—and survive to carry the cross...

...There is scriptural basis for most of these scenes, but Gibson's obsessive emphasis upon them is both cruel and morbid...

...Then the screen goes black and the first credit rolls: "Directed by Mel Gibson...

...I am afraid I agree with the commentators who have argued that The Passion of the Christ is bound to arouse both anger and spite, and that these emotions will be directed at those who mocked, cursed and tormented Jesus in his final hours—particularly the Jews...

...We can be grateful that he has shied away from some of the more ludicrous clichés that mar the Bible films of the 1950s and '60s...

...The charge that the movie is anti-Semitic has fueled the frenzy, transforming The Passion of the Christ, in media parlance, into a "controversial new film" and baiting the bigots among the movie's supporters to decry a Jewish conspiracy to repress it...

...Next, the crown of thorns is jammed into his head and he is again lashed repeatedly while bearing the cross through the streets...

...MUCH OF The Passion deviates from the Bible story...

...Gibson peddles a religion of mere emotion, of redemption through catharsis...

...Surely his suffering is an essential element of Christianity, but by excluding almost all mention of mercy, charity and the kingdom of heaven, Gibson has done more than obliterate the Word...

...So much for loving your enemies...

...Nevertheless, the air of authenticity that surrounds this film is as thin as its director's frequent professions of humility...

...His aim is to convey the impression of a contemporary epic, not to evoke ahistorically specific place and time...

...The most sexualized creature in the film, she reflects only terror...

...Gibson has cast a woman (Rosalinda Celentano) as Satan, who stalks the proceedings like a Freudian nightmare...

...In the director's case it was his pocketbook, rather than his body, that was gouged...

...only a god could endure such torments and live...

...No matter that historical sources of the period attest that Pilate was a vicious executioner and that the Romans routinely crucified their enemies...

...When she confronts Jesus at the beginning of the film, a serpent emerges from under her robes, slithering toward him until he crushes it...

...Hinting at his own martyrdom, he disdained his critics, whom he called "my detractors," as forcefully as his film despises the Jewish crowds who spit at Jesus during his hours of pain...

...English language paraphrases of biblical language sound stilted...

...After Jesus expires, his side is poked with a spear and a shower of blood pours out...

...Here Gibson's imagery, rather than the dialogue, works perniciously upon the viewer...

...Unlike the disciples, who sport Hollywood haircuts, the Jews have the appearance of an unwashed, poorly groomed mob, incapable of independent thought...

...rather, Jesus' lamb-like supporters seem to belong to a different species...

...he is telling us that the Jews are with the devil...

...I am no scholar of Aramaic, but the actors' enunciation—Jesus' name is pronounced differently by various costars—invites suspicion...

...He has eschewed deep-toned narration, hushed tableaux that linger on for hours, cameos for Hollywood personalities, and those pesky halos that appear suddenly about the heads of saints...

...Despite his reputation as a leading man, Gibson has never come across convincingly as a romantic lover...

...And the director is just warming us up for the scourging...

...One of the most distressing things about The Passion is its intimation that the character played by Jim Caviezel is the Messiah many in the 21 st century desire...

...It is no accident that Gibson cast the gorgeous Bellucci as Mary Magdalene orthat Caviezel looks like a model with his shirt off...

...Audiences will shrink in horror at the suggestion of violence...

...After a grating while, the experience of watching them becomes numbing, then tedious...

...when one arm proves too short, they tear it out of the socket...

...The music for the movie is not only anachronistic, it is irritating...

...For viewers, many of whom may never have seen a foreign-language film, the strange-sounding dialogue and subtitles may impart a certain gravitas...

...In terms of accuracy, though, the performers might as well be speaking Kickapoo...

...The Passion is not the most violent film ever made...

...Most of the actors playing Jews fit Middle Eastern stereotypes...

...Gibson's generosity to Pilate at the expense of the Jews is just one reason why many have found his film anti-Semitic...

...Gibson's Jesus outlines a path for his disciples' behavior that might be translated as "speak mercifully while obliterating your enemies...

...Pilate is eager to appease him...

...But if Gibson's modus operandi has any lasting influence over American filmmaking, it will be having proved to future directors that audiences possess an even higher tolerance for bloodletting than was previously assumed...

...The implication is that cultured Romans are too civilized to persecute an innocent man...

...One thing we can learn from The Passion of the Christ, and from the debate surrounding its anti-Semitism, is that there is great power to be gained in asserting victimhood...

...When he is laid upon it, the camera shows in closeup the soldiers hammering nails into his hands...

...Ever since, Gibson has reveled in the controversy, despite the fact that his fans and the film's boosters far outnumber his detractors...

...When this round of beatings ends, he infuriates his tormentors by rising, as if asking for more...

...Yet he insists upon the authenticity of his movie, claiming that of all such dramatizations to date, his is truest to the gospels...

...In interviews, the director has said that we all bear responsibility for the crucifixion, pointing out that when he shot the sequence, he personally held the spike to Jesus' palm...

...During Jesus' trials, Pilate offers him refreshment, seems sympathetic to his plight, and orders his execution only because he buckles under the pressure of an ugly Jewish mob threatening revolt...

...I have no idea what these bizarre interpolations have to do with the story Gibson is trying to tell, though they are consistent with the star's onscreen persona...

...Visually, however, they register as unapologetically foul, sinful, and sinister...

...Pilate's wife, Claudia (Claudia Procles), shows tremendous sympathy toward Jesus when the Roman soldiers torture him, looking mournfully on with Jesus' mother (Maia Morgenstern) and Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci...

...After the Romans incarcerate him, she stands above his dungeon and strokes the ground as if caressing a lover...

...Dreyer must have hoped that this would convey the agony of Jesus metaphorically, without having to resort to makeup or special effects...

...Just before he died, the renowned Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose The Passion of Joan of Arc dealt affectingly with sacrifice and salvation, was preparing a film about the life and death of Jesus...

...After outraged groups protested at some early screenings, he removed most of the subtitles that refer to the Jews' culpability...

...IN The Passion vengeance and suffering go hand in hand...

...He has created a savior who requires nothing difficult of his followers...

...Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia), the Jewish high priest, emerges as the film's real villain, more devilish than Satan...

...By the time they drag him away, we can see hundreds of long gashes all over his body...

...As soon as a draft of the script was leaked to the public, its readers declared the film anti-Semitic...

...And keeping in mind that Jesus advised the Pharisees to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's, we may also observe that Gibson's gamble has paid off handsomely...

...On camera, every stroke leaves a long crimson laceration on his body...

...Gibson solves this problem by having the Jews deliver their lines in Aramaic, the Roman soldiers in Latin...

...Caviezel suffers stoically, but evokes nothing of the personal Jesus, the figure of love and pathos in the Gospels...

...Jesus does not implore his audience to renounce their possessions or sinful ways...

...The shower murder in Psycho is still one of the most frightening sequences in film history, yet we never once see the assailant's knife pierce his victim's skin...

...This, of course, is more historical nonsense...

...In the first hour of The Passion of the Christ Jesus is beaten, chained, slapped, spit on, and dangled from a bridge...

...In both cases, pretensions to verisimilitude have more to do with what audiences are willing to buy than with anything approaching the realm of truth...

...For Gibson The Passion of the Christ is as much about his own spiritual epiphany and sacrifice as it is the story of Jesus' suffering...

...Apparently Gibson, raised on action films, couldn't make a story without a villain...

...A few moments later, when Jesus is on the cross, one of the thieves being crucified alongside him offers a curse...

...By differentiating between Jew and proto-Christian in an era where no such distinction existed, Gibson removes the burden of Jesus' death from the souls of those who believe themselves redeemed...

...Recently, while riding on the train, I overheard two women discussing the movie, one of whom remarked, "I had no idea Jesus was so handsome...

...But the movie, by vilifying Caiaphas and his crowing rabble far more than do the gospels, speaks otherwise...

...At each stage in Jesus' punishment, Gibson cuts to a closeup of Caiaphas' grimly approving face...

...This was expected, given the media frenzy that has surrounded the film, as well as Gibson's efforts to hawk it to evangelical groups...

...He had no authority over the Romans...

...In a flashback, Jesus the carpenter flirts with Mary...

...Most great directors have understood that although cinema is a visual medium, its power lies chiefly in how the mind absorbs and grasps the images...

...He spent $30 million of his personal fortune to make the picture—a million, we might note, for every piece of silver paid to Judas for his betrayal...

...When Diane Sawyer asked Gibson if he thought his film would turn its audiences against Jews, he replied that Schindler's List did not cause him to hate Germans...

...What about Jesus'moral suffering, the revelation that his disciples have betrayed him, the foreknowledge of what he will endure on his way to death, his final questioning of God and cries of forgiveness...

...This amusing juxtaposition underscores a point Gibson was not shy about making during the interviews he gave to promote the film...

...Composer John Debney, perhaps influenced by Howard Shore's scores for The Lord of the Rings, imagines Christ bopping to a New Age beat...

...Gibson never asserts the Jewishness of Jesus or the apostles...

...Like most of the films Gibson has appeared in, The Passion of the Christ asserts that this is aman's world and women are to be regarded as either saints or whores...

...In the film, these are scant or absent...

...Caviezel's patient suffering may convince viewers that by endorsing this film and the skewed Christianity it promotes they can imagine themselves as triumphant underdogs...

...In another deviation from the Gospels, a vulture, evidently an emissary from God, swoops in and plucks out the thief's eyes...

...its concrete enactment carries far less force...

...Calling The Passion the most credible of all New Testament adaptations is like declaring that the X-Men movies offer the most realistic treatment of mutants in the history of motion pictures...

...Despite Caiaphas' high position, he was a member of a people who were occupied by an invading army...

...The film recouped its investment in the first 24 hours of its release, made $100 million after five days, and $200 million after 12...

...The more invective pours out against Gibson, the more his admirers leap to his defense...

...at signs from Caiaphas, the soldiers commence and cease their beatings...

...The film suggests that to join the choir of the redeemed one need only feel awe in the face of the physical torments Jesus endured...

...Gibson cannot claim to be celebrating the humanity of Jesus...

...Gibson frequently pans to Satan walking back and forth among a crowd of Jews...

...He does not call upon them to evangelize...

...Shortly before his final ordeal, we catch a very brief flashback to the Sermon on the Mount—one of the few scenes in the film of Jesus preaching to his followers...

...For Gibson, it is the film's duty to cast blame and the audience's responsibility to feel a compassion he never shows on the screen...

...they pale before the attractive Western figures who play the appealing characters...

...Usually, as in Braveheart, the last film he directed, female figures are pushed to the margins...

...But the star's relentless self-promotion is not all that makes his claims about the sincerity and sanctity of his work difficult to stomach...

...Tying Jesus to a post, Roman soldiers thrash him furiously...

...This is a disturbing analogy...

...They occupy more than an hour of the film's running time...

...Supposedly heplanned to shoot the crucifixion from behind the cross, so that the audience would see only a nail splitting wood...

...After they drag him away, she gives the women white towels to wipe up the rivulets ofblood that surround the whippingpost...

...Other deviations seem equally driven by ideology...

...If a role calls for him to interact with women, as in Franco Zeffirelli's quirky Hamlet or the recent comedy What Women Want, sexual desires fill him with rage or fear...

...Oddly, Gibson depicts a mildly Oedipal relationship between Christ and his mother...

...Gibson, champion of superficiality, leaves nothing to the audience's imagination...

...His Jesus is tremendously problematic—a tragic reduction of the Christ of the New Testament...

...He makes further appearances on The Tonight Show, and the film rakes in greater and greater profits...

...I think some critics have called it that because nowhere else in the history of the commercial cinema has a director devoted so much energy to a physical assault upon a single character...

...Audiences would witness a real physical event and, understanding the context, attribute to it their own spiritual interpretation...

...the message is that he has power over the proceedings...

...Gibson seizes on the ambivalent reluctance of Pontius Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov) in the Gospels to order Jesus' death, and remakes him as a likable character...

...A refreshed Jesus (Jim Caviezel), shot in profile, walks confidently to the right of the frame, his gaze fixed determinedly ahead...

...The sorriest consequence of Gibson's gambit is that it may breed a generation of Christians who will mark a viewing of this unnecessarily bloody and narrow-minded film as their primary religious experience...