Archive for February, 2004

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »

The Passion of the Christ: Reading the reviews

Wednesday, February 25th, 2004

I’m writing this having not seen Mel Gibson’s movie yet.

I’m doing what I always do: checking out the reviews, getting an idea of what to expect and then seeing the movie. I’m wondering now if just seeing a movie before reading the reviews would be a better tack.

So far, I’m most impressed with Roger Ebert’s review of the movie. Both he and Richard Roeper gave the movie glowing reviews, but that’s not the reason I appreciate their take on the film. I mean, aside from the fact that Ebert is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning film critic — one of the best alive, I think — I appreciated this statement from him:

I prefer to evaluate a film on the basis of what it intends to do, not on what I think it should have done. It is clear that Mel Gibson wanted to make graphic and inescapable the price that Jesus paid (as Christians believe) when he died for our sins.

I’ve read two other reviews so far, one from Katherine Monk and another from John Stone, both in today’s Calgary Herald. Monk gave the movie a largely negative review based on her thought that the movie based such graphic imagery on “one sentence in the gospels.” She seemed to miss the fact that the word “scourge” carries with it a definition, which usually meant that a person was beaten with a whip, tipped with pieces of metal and bone, at least 49 times. It’s in the history books. Go look it up.

She basically gets to the point of her review in saying that Gibson should have let people’s imagination render the agony of Christ rather than spelling it out in its gore and realism: that the movie would have been infinitely better if he’d just let the audience imagine Jesus’ suffering rather than let them actually see and experience what the artist thought it may have been like.

It’s like saying an artist should only symbolically represent Jesus’ suffering rather than paint Him in blood. A pretty silly argument, I’d say.

Stone, at one point, criticizes the movie for using both symbolism and realism, as if Gibson were schizophrenic about his presentation of the story.

Again, a great take from Roger Ebert:

For we altar boys, [meditating on Christ's suffering and death] was not necessarily a deep spiritual experience. Christ suffered, Christ died, Christ rose again, we were redeemed, and let’s hope we can get home in time to watch the Illinois basketball game on TV.

What Gibson has provided for me, for the first time in my life, is a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of. That his film is superficial in terms of the surrounding message — that we get only a few passing references to the teachings of Jesus — is, I suppose, not the point. This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it.

I enjoyed Ebert’s commentary on the film because he understands the movie doesn’t want to be another symbol of Christ’s suffering. It wants to be an honest, open, and often brutal representation of the agony of the Cross. Gibson, who’s done several interviews on the movie, has said it over and over.

And here, from Gibson’s own mouth, the point of the film (from Christianity Today:

I went to the wounds of Christ in order to cure my wounds. And when I did that, through reading and studying and meditating and praying, I began to see in my own mind what he really went through. … It was like giving birth: the story, the way I envisioned the suffering of Christ, got inside me and started to grow, and it reached a point where I just had to tell it, to get it out.

Again, I haven’t seen this movie yet, and will be sure to post my own review when I do, but I just don’t appreciate a movie reviewer taking a film, (which was made to express a certain point and idea), telling me what they should have done to make it better — especially when it’s specifically a film about the suffering of Christ! And when the reviewer isn’t a filmmaker (unless I don’t know something about Stone or Monk?), its doubly offensive.

“Oh, there was too much suffering, so it was a bad movie.”

“The suffering was too literal, so it was a bad movie.”

Those are very silly comments, and for two reviewers on a national paper, I’d expect a lot more.

So, I’ll just say, “Thanks, Roger (if I can address you that way)!”

Thanks for trying to base a film on its intentions rather than on your would-be filmmaking prowess.

And thanks, too, for choosing not to write another screenplay. Your first one was a stinker.

OOH! Forum question: Who can name the one screenplay Roger Ebert wrote?

Update: Read a few more reviews off Rotten Tomatoes. Most of the negative ones are basically saying Gibson should have shown more of Jesus’ teaching and less of his death. One even said Scorsese got it right with The Last Temptation where Gibson got it wrong. Why does a film about the suffering of Jesus need to be about His teaching? Can someone tell me that?

Posted in Rants and Raves | Comments Off

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »