Gibson's 'Passion' a matter of choice
Ash Wednesday, traditionally advertised by the forehead thumbprints of black that many Christians wear, will arrive Feb. 25 with more fanfare than usual. The start of the Lenten march to Easter will also mark the release of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ," which some critics say could exacerbate anti-Semitism.
Filmmakers have interpreted the Passion since the infancy of pictures flickering on screens. The connecting thread is the inevitability of having to make choices. Knowledge of the Passion is limited -- the Gospels differ on certain details -- so any filmed account is selective, a batch of decisions to include some source materials while ignoring others. That point was the foundation of a Boston College forum this week on Passion movies.
"The Passion According to St. Mel," as the college's fine arts chairman, John Michalczyk, dubbed it, faces the same challenge as previous efforts.
While some Gospel elements present a benign view of the role Jews played in the crucifixion, centuries of anti-Semitism have grown from intrepretations of the Gospels that play up Jewish responsibility, said Philip Cunningham, head of the college's Center for Christian-Jewish Learning and Michalczyk's copresenter at the forum.
The upshot is that each filmmaker has cast the Passion in the values of the era in which the movie was made, reflecting that period's cultural sensitivity "or lack thereof," Michalczyk told listeners before screening clips of selected films.
"The Greatest Story Ever Told," as the title of a 1965 movie called the Passion events, through the years has drawn the attention of some of the greatest figures in the film industry. Directors from Cecil B. DeMille to Franco Zeffirelli to Martin Scorsese have weighed in, and film treatments of Jesus have run the gamut from satire (Monty Python's 1979 "Life of Brian") to all-out camp ("Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter," a kung-fu action treatment from 2001.)
Until Gibson, Michalczyk said, the only retelling that spawned major controversy was Scorsese's 1988 film, "The Last Temptation of Christ." Portraying a Jesus who contemplates abandoning his mission of salvation to enjoy a human life with a wife and family, the movie offended some by portraying Christ, in a dream sequence, as having sex with Mary Magdalene. One audience doused a screen with ink, and protesters carried crosses across a producer's lawn, Michalczyk said.
Americans aren't the only ones intrigued by the story. A few years ago, "Jesus of Montreal" offered a story about Canadian actors staging a life of Christ, with a stoic Jesus and a sarcastically modern judge in Pontius Pilate who said, "If I tried every fanatic in the Middle East, half the population would die." So what does Gibson's film say about its time? Neither Michalczyk nor Cunningham had seen it, but the latter sat on a panel of scholars that saw an early version of the script, and at the forum, he screened trailers that have appeared on the Internet.
If there's a prophet who foretold the coming of this film, it's Gibson himself -- the Gibson of the "Mad Max" and "Lethal Weapon" movies, marked by on-screen violence. The trailers for his "Passion" film suggest he cleaned out the fake blood shelf at the theatrical makeup store; the actor playing Jesus, James Caviezel, is covered in the stuff, having been beaten by a Jewish mob and scourged by the Romans. Cunningham said the scourging, in the script he read, was shown at gruesome length.
"He's appealing to a lot of the graphicness in films," said Michalczyk. "This is the creed of entertainment today, . . . part of his appeal to a younger audience."
However, there's a countercultural reference point as well. Gibson drew on the dreams of a little-known German nun whose visions in the early 1800s portrayed Jesus's suffering as brutally violent and the handiwork of Jews, Cunningham said. The writer who transcribed her images prefaced his book by saying they weren't literal history -- an admonition supported by her inaccurate description of the temple, Cunningham said.
Moreover, the Vatican has long since disavowed the idea of Jewish culpability; scholars note that crucifixion was a Roman execution.
Will all that matter? That, said Cunningham, who received e-mail laced with anti-Semitic venom after criticizing the movie last year, is "problematic."
Rich Barlow can be reached at rbarlow.81@alum.
