A martyr by any other name
If Mel Gibson is wondering how on earth his film version of Jesus' last hours could have avoided the buckets of hot ink being spilled over it, he might have opted for metaphor. You know: He could have subbed out the Son of Man and replaced him with, say, an unbreakable convict on a chain gang ("Cool Hand Luke") or a misunderstood robot from outer space ("The Day the Earth Stood Still").
Had Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" starred Kevin Spacey and been named "K-Pax," it probably wouldn't be on the cover of Newsweek, and Gibson could have saved himself that recent grilling from Diane Sawyer on "Primetime." He wanted the real thing, but sometimes an allegory gets the job done, too.
When done effectively, a good Christian allegory can win you years of attention. Look at "The Matrix." The writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski built an entire globe-conquering trilogy around Neo, a messiah who's also mentioned as the One. When it first appeared in 1999, "The Matrix" suggested a breathtaking polytheistic universe where Buddhists, Christians, and technology worshipers, among other denominations, joined forces to fight the rise of machines.
But by the arrival of its final installment, the brothers had clearly opted to end things with a rather tidy New Testament whimper. There was Neo embraced Pieta-style after being blinded. But it seems he perseveres only to give his life to rid mankind of soul-smothering special effects.
"The Matrix" and its two sequels pushed their allegory to grandiose proportions, and the movie cultivated its own disciples. It's one of the cinema's rare metaphors for Christ that's come close to sparking its own religion.
A Christ allegory built for the multiplex typically refashions the story for modern times. Activity usually centers on a loner or a misfit and his (or her) unique or controversial choices. Sometimes he's hated, then loved, but rarely redeemed in time for the climactic martyring. Artists make their own idiosyncratic departures. Richard Kelly came up with a time-traveling, schizophrenic high school mutant (Jake Gyllenhaal) for 2001's "Donnie Darko." Donnie suffers, presumably, for his ability to empathize with his fellow man.
When filmmakers get allegorical for stories of outcasts, innocents, and the unjustly maligned, they can seem like thinly veiled autobiographical tales of what misfits the directors once were. Think John Sayles's "Brother From Another Planet" (1984) or Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" (1990).
Biblical imagery appears prominently in several of Spike Lee's movies. But, astonishingly, it's "Summer of Sam," from 1999, that really brings messianic themes into the sharpest light. The film is one of Lee's best, using the 1977 string of David Berkowitz murders to show a Jesus-Judas bond between childhood friends in an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. One buddy, Vinnie (John Leguizamo), holds such a contradictory but pious view of Catholicism that he has to cheat on his wife to keep her pure. The other, Richie (Adrien Brody), has been going into Manhattan and exploring his sexuality, coming home with an outrageous mohawk haircut and British accent.
The stranger Richie seems, the more humid the city gets, and the longer Berkowitz goes uncaught, the more Richie appears like the killer to Vinnie and the rest of his friends. What Richie really wants is to bring peace and punk rock to his intolerantly paranoid and disco-whipped friends. Still, Vinnie plants the Judas kiss, as it were, on his pal. When Richie perishes, it's a necessary leap of dramatic faith: The metaphor must out.
Of course, not every martyr is moving. When good Samaritan Trevor (Haley Joel Osment) dies at the end of 2001's "Pay It Forward," the religiosity is completely unearned because it arrives in the 11th hour. In "K-Pax," when Prot (Kevin Spacey) comes to earth from another planet -- or is it the mental ward down the hall? -- bearing psycho-celestial healing, you wish that someone would up the dosage on his meds. And not long after John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) shows up in "The Green Mile," innocently on death row, it becomes clear that this primitive, magic mountain of a man will suffer a racially charged execution in a haze of white guilt.
Hollywood tends to shout from the choir loft to the rafters about its garish, maudlin, or obvious metaphors. More independent-minded filmmakers seem to trust you to follow along.
Bringing cinema closer to Christ without depicting Jesus himself was a tradition for some Europeans, the two masters being Denmark's Carl Dreyer and France's Robert Bresson. Both directors' bodies of work are staked upon the relation of man to God, exploring devotion and suffering in uniquely different ways.
Dreyer, in "The Passion of Joan of Arc," from 1928, created a vivid and fraught refraction of Christ through the fervent, unrepentant Joan. The film depicts a passion in the biblical sense -- the rights and wrongs are absolute, and the suffering has a psychological dimension. Bresson's blood runs cooler, but in "Diary of a Country Priest" (1951) and most wrenchingly in 1966's "Au Hasard Balthazar," which centers on the life of an abused donkey, he fights like no other director to communicate the complex trials of faith. A direct descendant of both men is the Danish director Lars von Trier. His American breakthrough came in 1996 with "Breaking the Waves," an epic tragedy about a bride (Emily Watson) whose unwavering belief in love is considered, by the punishers in her Calvinist town, to be obscene and naive, and her death is heavily symbolic.
Von Trier would fashion an even better variation with the semimusical melodrama "Dancer in the Dark," in which a woman named Selma (Bjork) is taken to death row for reasons that make little sense. Motherhood turns out to be the devastating explanation for her willingness to suffer.
Some of these films, Bresson's in particular, would make for a powerful Sunday school. And when I was about 9, someone in my family thought it was a good idea for me to go to a few classes. The idea was for me to have a sense, as my mother later explained, of the "history of Christianity." The classes were in the basement of a Baptist church in North Philadelphia. The instructors were a husband-wife team, the Washingtons, who assured us that Jesus was everywhere.
Our first assignment was to go out and find him. I didn't have to look too far or too wide. That night, the ABC Sunday Night Movie was "Superman." Here, Kal-El comes to Earth from Krypton; he's raised in small-town America when really he's a superhuman people protector.
Disguised as a reporter, he slips out of his suit and into tights when danger calls, eventually running into trouble when evil Lex Luthor tries a hostile takeover of the world.
Superman makes fervent believers of a skeptical populace that turns to him in times of trouble. Is this what the Washingtons meant? When I presented this information the following Sunday, no one seemed impressed. Neither teacher bought the Man of Steel as an allegory for Christ. Jesus, apparently, was everywhere else. Still, I'm convinced they weren't watching the right movies.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
