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Edited on Fri Mar-05-04 05:21 PM by NightTrain
...it got a two-star review (out of a possible five) in this week's HARTFORD ADVOCATE. Here's what the paper's critic, John Boonstra, had to say about the film:
It was distressing when the house lights went down at "The Passion of the Christ" and, bam!, the film began immediately. There were no previews of coming attractions, no in-house jingle, no ads for Coca-Cola. This was not an audience that was likely to have any interest in other R-rated films arriving at the megaplex in the near future. And not an audience that was going to be restlessly grazing the concession counter. Mind you, this was a standard show on opening day, and a national theater chain had chosen to run this motion picture as if it were something else altogether. "Eurotrip" was playing next door. Did it merit similar reverential treatment?
Mel Gibson directs this lightning-rod for controversy, in which the teachings of Jesus (Jim Caviezel) are largely ignored in favor of a morbid fixation on his scourging and crucifixion. Oh, there are quick flashbacks, filmed months after principal photography was completed, attempting to rectify this unbalancing omission, but they're so minimal that they only serve to remind us of how much is absent.
Is the film anti-Semitic? Possibly. Pay attention to the pivotal scene where poor Pontius Pilate succumbs to the repeated demands of the Jews and, washing his own hands clean of the deed, hands Jesus over for crucifixion. Suddenly the subtitles vanish, but the High Priest Caiphas is clearly heard enunciating the infamous incantation which has provided the excuse for two millennia of persecution: "Let his blood be on us and on our children!" This blood libel -- a line which appears in Matthew, alone of the four Gospels, freeing Gibson to abandon it if he'd wanted to -- is uttered in Aramaic, without subtitles, but those who have ears to hear will receive the message, loud and clear.
And did we really need cinematic chicanery such as slo-mo (when Judas kisses Jesus to betray him, and then, endlessly, during the last hour's flogging and cross-dragging) and demonic f/x (what's this stuff with an androgynous Satan who glides like Gary Oldman's Dracula?) to beef up this story? Give Gibson some credit for using Aramaic and Latin dialogue (though most scholars will tell you that conversations between Jews and Romans back then were in Greek), which does provide an otherworldly sensibility. At its best, the film is a series of vivid tableaux culled from the paintings of Renaissance masters, buttressed by the superb cinematography from Caleb Deschanel. At its worst, it's a dubious, divisive enterprise. Gibson's correct when he cites Tarentino's Kill Bill as a more violent film, spurt for spurt. But in terms of a single individual's awful suffering, he's gone into an entirely new sadomasochistic realm (oddly prefigured by the disembowelment at the end of Braveheart -- or, in a different vein, via the paranoia of his character in Conspiracy Theory ). Jesus is scourged so severely that the white bones of his rib cage can be discerned beneath the bloody strips of his flayed skin.
As Jon Stewart has wisely observed, "So courageous to make a Pro-Jesus film in America!" Yet its obsessive ultraviolence makes The Passion one of the lesser films on the subject. Scorsese did it better. Pasolini did it better. Heck, Zeffirelli's made-for-TV Jesus of Nazareth did it better. Without the context of Christ's enduring message, what's left in this story except misery?
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