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14 March 2004

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My tears didn’t stop

Review: Passion to the point of the absurd

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Passion to the point of the absurd

The Passion of the Christ. Starring James Caviezel and Monica Bellucci. Directed, produced and screenplay by Mel Gibson.

Reviewed by Fr Richard Leonard SJ

No one can doubt the personal devotion and faith Mel Gibson has brought to The Passion of the Christ. He has put his money where his soul is. Gibson is in a long line of distinguished directors like the Cecil B DeMille, George Stevens, Martin Scorsese and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who brought their particular passions to bear on that of Jesus.

Every portrayal of Jesus in the cinema provides an insight into the historical events recorded in the Gospels. If it did not we would not recognise the story. But every passion play, and that is the genre of these films, is also a commentary on the here and now.

During the roaring 20s DeMille in King of Kings gave the world an epic and spectacular Jesus. In the 1960s Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told bombed at the box office because he bought nothing fresh to the story or its images. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew had as much to do with Marx as Matthew, and by the 1980s Scorsese’s Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ dreamt about what life would be like with a wife and kids.

To realise their insights into the Jesus story on screen, all these directors, bar Pasolini, and now including Gibson, commit a fundamental and serious mistake. They collapse the four canonical Gospels into one, as though they are identical stories about Jesus. Then they take whatever they want from this biblical smorgasbord. Unlike the Church in its liturgical traditions in Holy Week, The Passion of the Christ liberally jumps between all the narratives with no regard for any particular Gospel.

The Second Vatican Council, in its decree On Divine Revelation, and the Pontifical Biblical Commission have warned that this process does a disservice to the integrity of each of the texts, and can do harm to the portrait of Jesus that it paints.

Fr Richard Leonard is the director of the Australian Catholic Film Office.

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