Blood, gore, terrible wounds, extreme physical suffering, in short, the pornography of violence, are essential to Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. "The" Christ is the iconic, symbolic, divine Christ; in contrast to Jesus Christ, the individual human being. Whatever your belief about the Son of God, who is also referred to in the film as the Son of Man, the human figure reflects the symbolic one. And for many believers that interchangeable identity is central to their faith.

I have no problem with people practicing their faith. Or anyone making a film about what they believe in. Witness Robert Duval's film "The Apostle".A film about a flawed and frequently devious preacher who also has the power to heal. We see the character with all his flaws and identify with him. We know that there is some good in him worth keeping alive. The preacher wrestles with his spirit – like Joseph wrestling with the angel – or Daniel in the lion's den. .   

Jesus' humanity in Gibson's film is not fully realized..– except through flash backs into his early life. Snap shot scenes with Mary, Jesus at work as a carpenter, snippets of the Last Supper, the Sermon On The Mount, none of this done with depth. Instead Gibson relies on the vicious, unrelenting whipping of Jesus to move the film through the Stations of the Cross into the Crucifixion.  The violence becomes repetitive, distracting, blood thirsty, numbing. The whip lashes, shredded flesh, and blood stained wounds inflicted on Jesus are the central focus of the film. The Passion of the Christ has less to do with "do on to others as you would have them do on to you", and more to do with "forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."   

Apparently Gibson inserted the flash backs when most of the film was done. Believers may very well fill in the blanks. But what about the rest of us, those of us who relate to the teaching in the life of Jesus, his humane message?  

In Jesus of Montreal, a film that reveals the humanity of the impact of Jesus, a director  takes on the job of staging a passion play that has grown moldy with time and attracts few viewers. Both the director and the performers achieve moral and spiritual insight putting on the play. Audiences flock to see their version of the Stations of the Cross - the Via Dolorosa (the Way of Sorrow). The Sermon On The Mount  is staged in a Montreal sewer. Well dressed people step into the sewer to listen to the sermon. That is what it must of have been like in the backwaters of the holy land, where the poor, and people in despair, flocked to see their spiritual teacher. There is also an apt satirical scene, where the director of the passion play, now portraying Christ, is up on a cross in a public park and a cop gives him a ticket for vagrancy. The scene reveals rote thinking at its most absurd.  

In Gibson's film,  actor James Caviezel (The Count of Monte Cristo) portrays Jesus. Caviezal is handsome, placid, quiet, soft spoken – a Hollywood movie star – like Gibson himself. Compare that to the Jesus image created by director Pier Paolo Pasolini in his film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Here Jesus is revealed as both an earthy and a spiritual human being.  Gaunt, frail, tormented by the lies of humanity; silent, penetrating, painfully aware of his role as a hard put upon fisher of men; Pasoliini's Jesus bears the weight of his suffering waiting for those around him to stop lying to themselves. Caviezal essentially remains wooden under Gibson's direction. Wood is a poor substitute for character development.

Satan in Gibson's film is a woman following Jesus around with seductive, checker-board moves, and hungry-for-your-soul eye contact. When Jesus and Satan meet head on - all hell breaks loose. "Do not look down so fierce upon me!" playwright Christopher Marlowe's Faust cried out - as he was pulled into Hell. There is a short jump from that cogent Elizabethan quote into Mel Gibson's mind transfixed by medieval tricks of the trade. When it comes to Good and Evil, Gibson uses the tempting association with Satan to highlight the crucifixion as an act of divine intervention. His Satan becomes the Axis of Evil.  

At the height of the crucifixion, when Jesus gives his spirit up to God, Satan (Rosalinda Celentano), in anguish out of not capturing Jesus' soul, breaks into a wild cinematic rage. An explosive sexual transformation takes place: She becomes He. But look at the effect a little more closely. Is the Devil a transvestite, a gay deceiver, a bisexual calamity? Another throw of the dice in Gibson's pantheon of evil doers? From here on in, it's Gibson's medieval version of Christianity versus Them. Whoever "them" or " they" may be – take your pick: Jews, homosexuals, bisexuals, wayward women, unbelievers, whatever. Gibson is there to pin point the enemy for us in black and white terms.   

To give Gibson credit,  the woman in the film,  Mary (Maia Morgenstern), Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci), and the wife of Pontius Pilate (Claudia Gerina), who gives Mary the towels to wipe up Jesus' blood, are the harbingers of compassion. The terrible ordeal of Jesus' whipping and crucifixion, seen through Mary's eyes, becomes painfully poignant, deeply disturbing, identifiable. Only one man intervenes, Simon of Lyrene, identified by a Roman soldier as a Jew. Simon shows active compassion for Jesus. Jesus stumbles again and again. Enraged over the brutality, Simon, with great effort, picks up the huge cross for Jesus, pulls him up by the wrist, and together they carry the overwhelmingly heavy burden to the site of the crucifixion. One of the few moments in the film where the grace of shared humanity rises above the blood thirsty gore and whipping from the Roman guards. For once Gibson makes compassion a universal phenomenon.   

What about the charges of anti-semitism?  

In the Gibson film Jesus is mocked by the Roman soldiers as the "King of the Jews".  A conflicted Pontius Pilate (Ivano Marescotti) gives into the demands of the leader of the Jews and his congregation who want Jesus crucified for claiming to be the messiah. Does Gibson really expect us to believe that Pontius Pilate was troubled with a conscience? Pilate was called back to Rome by Caesar because of the excessive nature of his brutality and the overwhelming number of people he crucified – 250,000 -  the majority of them Jews. Gibson leaves us with the impression that Jews are collectively guilty for the crucifixion of Christ.

Here is where I knock heads with him.   

Listen to Gibson's 85 year old father who tells anyone listening that the Holocaust didn't exist. Here are Horton Gibson's comments as reported in the New York Daily News (the brackets are mine):   

"They (the Jews) claimed that there were 6.2 million in Poland before the war, and they claimed after the war there were 200,000 - therefore he (Hitler) must have killed 6 million of them," he said. "They simply got up and left! They were all over the Bronx and Brooklyn and Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles".  He (Horton Gibson) said the Germans did not have enough gas to cremate 6 million people and that the concentration camps were just "work camps." "It's all - maybe not all fiction - but most of it is".  

Aside from Horton Gibson's confusion of numbers, and the locations of where the mass gassing and killings occurred, Mel Gibson has yet to distance himself from his father's rantings. I understand how difficult it might be for him to do so. I do not believe that the transgressions of a father should be heaped on the shoulders of the son. But I am sure Gibson knows that fathers have a way of influencing their sons actions, Having played Hamlet taking his cues from his father's ghost, Mel Gibson should know better.   

If he doesn't distance himself from his father's vicious comments, then maybe Mel Gibson will now do a film on the Nazi concentration camps? I'd like to see what he does with that one.

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