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February 24, 2004
TT: Face to face
I found this in my e-mailbox yesterday morning. It's a story from the Chicago Sun-Times:Mel Gibson's controversial "The Passion of the Christ," which recounts the final hours in the life of Jesus, finally opens Wednesday, and the Sun-Times' own Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper offered an exclusive early review of the movie on their syndicated series "Ebert & Roeper" this weekend.
Giving "Passion" their trademark stamp of approval of "two thumbs way up," Ebert and Roeper called it "a great film."
"It's the only religious movie I've seen, with the exception of 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' by [Italian director Pier Paolo] Pasolini, that really seems to deal with what actually happened," said Ebert, who is the Sun-Times film critic.
"This is the most powerful, important and by far the most graphic interpretation of Christ's final hours ever put on film," said Roeper, a Sun-Times columnist. "Mel Gibson is a masterful storyteller, and this is the work of his lifetime. You have to admire not just Gibson for his vision and his directing abilities, but Jim Caviezel [as Christ] and the rest of the cast."...
As it happens, I was about to leave for a screening of The Passion of the Christ when that e-mail arrived. The screening took place at the Brill Building, an address well known to show-business aficionados: A.J. Liebling wrote about it in the Thirties, calling it "the Jollity Building," and later on it became known as the Tin Pan Alley of Sixties rock. It struck me as nicely ironic that I would be seeing a movie about the Crucifixion in such a place.
Screening rooms are dismal little affairs, comfortable enough but far from atmospheric, and in no way suited to anything remotely approaching religious contemplation. This one, not surprisingly, was full of people making calls on cell phones and conversing in notice-me voices. One fellow was earnestly explaining how Mel Gibson couldn't possibly be a good Christian, having previously expressed his longing to impale Frank Rich's intestines on a stick. "On a basic level," he intoned, "it occurs to me that Jesus was a gentle guy."
The lights went down and the film started, accompanied at first by whispered conversation, though that faded out after a few minutes. I suspect that not a few people were shocked into silence by the film's evident high seriousness, not to mention the high quality of its craftsmanship: the actors are excellent, the production design and photography handsome without ever lapsing into picturesque self-indulgence. The one exception is the overblown music, which can't begin to compare with Miklós Rózsa's remarkable scores for Ben-Hur and King of Kings. Rózsa made those movies seem more serious than they really were. On the other hand, The Passion of the Christ bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of the big-ticket Biblical epics of the Fifties and Sixties. Instead, it's what Gibson said it would be, an almost entirely naturalistic portrayal of the Crucifixion as described in the Bible. In an odd sort of way, it put me in mind of Master and Commander, another film that went to unusual lengths to reproduce the sights and sounds of a far-off world. (The use of Aramaic and Latin dialogue helps--a lot.)
Everything you've heard about the violence in The Passion of the Christ is true. It's jarring, almost sickening. Yet I didn't find it gratuitous, given the film's initiating premise, though the scourging of Jesus went on well past the point of diminishing artistic returns, however "realistic" it may have been. In any case, there is nothing in The Passion of the Christ that will startle viewers familiar with Western religious art. The difference--and it's a big one--is that this is a film, not a mural. Photographs pack a punch quite different from even the most gruesome paintings. To say that The Passion of the Christ suggests a Caravaggist Crucifixion come to life, while true enough, understates its impact. Of course it's only a movie, and we've all read about the special effects, but Gibson and his collaborators create an illusion of reality so enveloping that it's possible to forget yourself.
Not that many of the people who came to the Brill Building yesterday were likely to have forgotten themselves. They were New York media types, not the viewers I had in mind when I told Janet Maslin the other day that "most of the people who see The Passion of the Christ will regard it as a film about something that actually happened. That's something that a lot of the people writing about it are apt to misunderstand." We live, after all, in an age when ostensibly serious art critics for major newspapers and magazines can get away with turning up their noses at the Metropolitan Museum's El Greco retrospective because of its subject matter. I doubt that many of their cinematic counterparts will find it possible, much less easy, to write about The Passion of the Christ as a movie qua movie.
Even so, there wasn't a whole lot of chatter to be heard in the lobby, or the elevator, as we left to write our stories. "So, was it intense?" one person waiting for the next screening asked. It was. And--just for the record--I'll be very much surprised if it isn't a very big hit.
Posted February 24, 2004 12:01 PM
