The Gospel of John
"The Gospel of John" is to "The Passion of the Christ" as tap water is to parboiled sacramental wine.
The British-Canadian coproduction -- a three-hour-long, word-for-word retelling of the New Testament gospel -- was released last September and had been quietly playing smaller US cities until Mel Gibson proved there was a mass audience to support (and serious money to be made from) Christian cinema. Those looking for an alternative to the ultraviolent martyrama of "Passion" stand to find "Gospel" inspirational and moving. Those seeking a great movie will still be wandering in the wilderness.
The sad truth is that director Philip Saville and writer John Goldsmith have made a picture book rather than a film, one that leans so heavily on Christopher Plummer's placid voice-over narration as to be cinematically inert. Peopled with earnest overactors and featuring a Jesus who has the benevolent, unruffled smile of a high school grief counselor, "Gospel" is as dull as the desert sands.
The intentions are honorable, though, and the approach doggedly scriptural. In the beginning is the word and the word is God; then there's John the Baptist (Scott Handy), and then there's Jesus (Henry Ian Cusick), "the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." The apostles gather; Andrew runs to Simon Peter, exclaiming, "We have found the Messiah!" and Plummer's voice instructs us that "This word means `Christ.' " How wonderful: a film that comes with its own footnotes.
All credit goes to "The Gospel of John" for sticking to the text and focusing on the positive side -- the sermons, the beneficence, the deepest and hardest sort of forgiveness of which most of us are still not capable. And after the bruising core sample of the Greatest Story Ever Told that is Gibson's vision, it's at least useful and at most a pleasure to get this unedited version, with every word of each lesson present and accounted for.
That sense of duty keeps "Gospel" a puppet show, though. The filming has the flat sheen of a telefilm, and the acting rarely rises above the community theater level. The thoughtful elegance of Jeff Danna's score is the movie's subtlest aspect; lead actor Cusick, exuding the animation of a 3-D winking-Jesus postcard, is its biggest missed opportunity.
More than in "Passion," though, you understand why the man's message was revolutionary (and still is), and also why many thought the Messiah merely had a messiah complex. You may be struck, too, by the thought that Jesus is preaching metaphor to a literalist civilization that just doesn't have the tools. "We cannot go where he will be going?" says an incredulous Pharisee, echoing the Savior. "What does he mean? Greece?" At such times, one prays for the Monty Python gang to barge through the door and announce the whole thing's a put-on.
The differences with "The Passion of the Christ" are instructive, though. "Gospel" errs on the side of gentility, showing us a mere shadow of a whip-wielding centurion and a trickle of blood on the Savior's brow, while its presentation of the crucifixion is more in line with physical probability (Jesus carries only the crossbar of the cross to Golgotha; the nails pierce his wrists rather than his hands). But the film is also more troubling than "Passion" in the unexamined anti-Semitism it takes from its source. On one level, this merely reflects bad acting: As the head Pharisee, Hippola, Richard Lintern literally twirls his mustache in the tradition of Snidely Whiplash. But where Gibson made sure to provide "good Jews" and "bad Jews," Saville gives us all bad Jews all the time. "Gospel" is so removed from ethnological reality that when one of the apostles addresses Jesus as "rabbi," Plummer has to inform us that "this word means `teacher.' "
"Gospel" gets the letter, all right, but not the spirit. "The Passion of the Christ," meanwhile, revels in an amped-up version of Jesus' death. The movie that effectively conveys the passion of the man's life remains to be made.
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