Review: Passion downside - ‘cruelty, inaccuracy, anti-semitism’

The
Catholic Weekly
Online

Sydney
14 March 2004

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Review: Passion downside - ‘cruelty, inaccuracy, anti-semitism’

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Review: Passion downside - ‘cruelty, inaccuracy, anti-semitism’

Simon of Cyrene (Jarreth Merz) helps Jesus (Jim Caviezel) carry his cross in a scene from The Passion of The Christ, a film by Mel Gibson. Photos by Philippe Antonello

Reviewed by Jan Epstein

After months of cleverly orchestrated controversy, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has arrived in cinemas here and elsewhere. But what will audiences make of the film, which is not only coloured throughout by anti-semitism, but wallows in unrelenting violence and almost sado-masochistic cruelty?

True, we all see things reflected through our own personal values and cultural perspectives. But to this reviewer it seems very odd that a film dealing with a sentinel historical event about love, sacrifice, and redemption – for Christians ‘the greatest story ever told’ – can become in Gibson’s hands so profoundly bleak, unremittingly punitive, and joyless.

Gibson’s The Passion is about Jesus’ sufferings in the last 12 hours of his life, before his crucifixion and resurrection. The film begins in the Garden at Gethsemane, where Jesus (Jim Caviezel) waits for Judas’ betrayal to bear fruit, in the form of Jewish soldiers who come to arrest him in the name of Caiphas, the Jewish high priest.

These early scenes are cinematically successful, in particular the depiction of Satan (Rosalinda Celantano) as a slinking androgyne, the masculine poetry of Caleb Deschanel’s photography, and the successful use of the historical languages Aramaic and Latin (which are both interesting to listen to and easily read in English subtitles).

But like the snake that Satan sets lose in the Garden (which Jesus crushes with his heel), when Jesus is taken back within the walls of Jerusalem to be tried for blasphemy in the Sanhedrin’s illegally constituted ‘kangaroo court’, The Passion’s artistic, theological and intellectual credibility become irretrievably compromised.

Jan Epstein is an associate of the Australian Catholic Film Office and the senior film reviewer for The Australian Jewish News.

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