At the risk of turning into Your Official Home for Christians Made Vaguely Queasy by This Mel Gibson Movie, I offer the first review of The Passion of the Christ from a reviewer who, you know, watches movies for a living. It's David Denby of the New Yorker. Does he like it? Not so much.
"Gibson, of course, is free to skip over the incomparable glories of Jesus’ temperament and to devote himself, as he does, to Jesus’ pain and martyrdom in the last twelve hours of his life. As a viewer, I am equally free to say that the movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beatings, blood, and agony."
The review is least compelling when Denby starts flirting with higher criticism of the Gospels in his second segment. We've been here before. But stick with it; the last section of the review has an insightful critique into The Passion's place in the history of atonement art, and how Gibson has reduced Christ's life and redemption to a tableau of pain. Which, come to think of it, is just what the Romans were trying to do.
"Crucifixion, as the Romans used it, was meant to make a spectacle out of degradation and suffering—to humiliate the victim through the apparatus of torture. By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. And by casting James Caviezel, an actor without charisma here, and then feasting on his physical destruction, he has turned Jesus back into a mere body. The depictions in “The Passion,” one of the cruellest movies in the history of the cinema, are akin to the bloody Pop representation of Jesus found in, say, a roadside shrine in Mexico, where the addition of an Aztec sacrificial flourish makes the passion a little more passionate. Such are the traps of literal-mindedness."
Posted by mesh at February 23, 2004 01:09 PM | TrackBackWow. Dr. Davis, voicing his concerns with the film, made a point to me during lunch today, taking a line from Romans that fits with Denby's thoughts: "the glory of the incorruptable God into an image made like corruptable man".
Posted by: JosiahQ at February 23, 2004 02:27 PMMesh -
I have to admit that I was really turned off by Denby's review when I first read it because of his casual dismissal of all conservative, traditional scholarship as 'medieval', un-scientific, excessively 'literal-minded', yadda-yadda-yadda. At that point, it was difficult to see how much of his review was because he didn't like Gibson's movie, and how much because he doesn't like conservative Christianity (the first paragraph you quoted vaguely hints at that, too - Jesus is a moral model, not the savior of the world).
I suspect much of conservative evangelicalism sees the attacks on Gibson as being so closely intermixed with attacks on conservative evangelicalism through the deriding of 'literal traditionalism', etc., that much of the defense for Gibson is because conservatives are feeling like they are just as much under attack.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on all this. How do you tell how much of a critique of The Passion is solely because someone does not like Jesus as presented in the gospels, and how much is a genuine artistic critique? Is it possible to comment on The Passion without dealing with one's own relationship with Jesus?
In case this isn't clear, I'm not trying to pick a fight with you; I really am interested to know what you think on this.
Posted by: maphet at February 23, 2004 03:29 PMdo you think that, amid all the physical torture, there's a danger of losing sight of what was really the worst part of the cross: the wrath of the Father
Posted by: bobw at February 23, 2004 04:37 PM"By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art."
So by representing (well) what Christ's killers intended to do to him when they killed him, Gibson has cancelled out redemption in art? That was one of the stupidest lines of the whole review.
"And by casting James Caviezel, an actor without charisma here, and then feasting on his physical destruction, he has turned Jesus back into a mere body."
Part of the point is that Jesus lived in a "mere body" and his "mere body" was BROKEN. The physical destruction was for a distinct purpose.
Posted by: John at February 24, 2004 09:53 AMIt seems like Gibson is telling one distinct part of the atonement - one that I think we often fail to grasp. Each week, we talk about the death and resurrection, but to what degree do we really apprehend the physical pain the Godman endured? Ebert has a great review, noting that it succeeded in giving him what he always lacked - a visceral understanding of what transpired. I, for one, have always - and I'm not just saying this - failed to really enter into the suffering of Christ in any meaningful way. For whatever reason, the narratives themselves have always felt too terse, with barely any detail for me to understand the people very well, including Jesus. I guess I've been looking forward to this partly because I feel like I need what Ebert described.
Posted by: scott cunningham at February 24, 2004 01:44 PM