The Passion of the Christ (Full Screen Edition)
by Mel Gibson
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Actor: Christo Jivkov, Francesco De Vito, Jim Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern, Monica BellucciDirector: Mel Gibson
Brand: FOX Home Entertainment
Cinematographer: Caleb Deschanel
Producer: Mel Gibson
Writer: Mel Gibson
Producer: Bruce Davey
Producer: Enzo Sisti
Producer: Stephen McEveety
Writer: Benedict Fitzgerald
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Hebrew (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 127 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-08-31
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Reviews of The Passion of the Christ (Full Screen Edition)
DVD Review: A morbid and brutal apologia for muscular Christianity
Summary: 1 Stars
I am not a Christian but acknowledge that Jesus Christ and his followers have had and continue to have a profound influence on my life, in fact on all our lives. I was therefore really keen to watch this film that dealt with one of the most central acts of this often told life - the actual moments of our redemption. I have never understood what this "redemption" business is about - what it is from or what it leads to, and I have always failed to see any logic at all in the view that someone's suffering and death could in some bizarre way be the trigger required to achieve it.
So my interest was piqued by what this film might offer and by some one the more enthusiastic reviews I had read and heard about it.
Well, I have seen a lot of pain and suffering in my time - as have we all if our eyes are open to it - and this was something else entirely. This was fantasy terror, sadomasochism with Hollywood lighting, the inflicting of horrific injuries that would close down or paralyze any human nervous system. One of the points of the Jesus Christ story is that he is supposed to have been a man - a real mortal flesh and blood, thinking, feeling man. Well the stoic masochist in this film was no mortal man. With injuries that would have felled a shrieking elephant, injuries that would have caused everything from hemorrhage to brain damage, he quietly and thoughtfully staggers on his holy way even offering the occasional smart remark to bystanders.
This film was just another spectacular portrayal of one of history's most lucrative brands. I realized when it had finished that I had wanted to feel something genuine and authentic, to have some glimmer of understanding about this whole business of suffering as a ticket to good things in the next life. Instead I was almost numbed by its portrayal - if not downright betrayal - of a life well lived, a life that challenged pomposity, a life that offered solace to the poor, kindness and acceptance to so many people who were considered unworthy by those who held religious power, and a life that was finally squashed and scourged and murdered by the religious power brokers of his day
If Christ's passion was as full on as the scriptures tell us then Mel Gibson's understanding of passion [as suffering] is less than ordinary. It is truly one dimensional, myopic and what you would expect from someone who is so certain and self-satisfied about their world view, that they cannot see the reality and the suffering and the prejudice and the hatred and the bitterness and the cruelty that Jesus Christ, I sometimes think, understood and indeed experienced.
Physical suffering is graphic no doubt but it also provokes real responses like fear and cries of anguish. Surely there was far more to the passion of Jesus Christ - a passion that captured the suffering of the entire world - and the Gibson film connected with none of it. Humiliation and ostracism, being the outcast or the sinner, the epileptic or the leper, the shunned man or the shamed woman, or even the gay man or the incarcerated black American in today's terms, are clearly things that Jesus understood and about which Mel Gibson has absolutely no idea. The passion of Jesus Christ was as much the pain of his rejection by his own, the shame and fear and helplessness he brought to his own mother and those he loved and cared about - to the point that they were not even prepared to be associated with him. Gibson portrays this denial of connection as some kind of fear of physical harm. The fact that it takes courage to stand up and stand out, to be associated with those upon whom the crowd has turned, was as much a part of Peter's fear filled denial of Christ as any fear of being physically harmed.
The film just doesn't get it at even the most basic level. Christ was humiliated. He was outcast. He was betrayed by people he would apparently do anything for. His clothes were stripped from him and he was mocked cruelly - the crown of thorns, the sign above him on the cross - all of it as much about mockery and ridicule as it was about the excruciating physical pain he had to endure like a cur in front of - and if we are to believe him, at the hands of - those he actually loved.
Has Gibson any understanding of what it might be like to be beaten and broken by those you love - really, honestly love. I suspect that Gibson probably sees nudity as a sexual thing - which of course it often is - and viewers have had the Gibson anatomy pretty much in our faces over the years - but he is seemingly too squeamish to let us see Christ stripped bare, degraded, mocked and totally humiliated. We are also spared the kind of choking tears and heart-rending sense of hopelessness that racked the very being of Christ as he - he who ostensibly would have known so much - begged his so called father to be spared, a father who could not be convinced to let this particular chalice pass. This is the passion of abandonment.
The power of a real man reduced to the basest suffering, reduced to the sum of all our suffering, is not to be found in this mawkish film. This is a film for those who like their Christianity white, piously respectable and physical. The fact that so many desperate people have lauded this film, watched and re-watched it, speaks volumes of the intellectual poverty and deep-felt craving which exist among so many modern Christians - their need to have something to pin their increasingly strident and intolerant beliefs upon. You just have to ask "What is the agenda for this film? What on earth is Gibson's brutal physical reductionism leading to?"
The world is increasingly dominated by the new evangelical Christians, and the old traditional fundamentalists, with their noses found deeply in the trough of the world's "abundance", insensitive to the costs paid by suffering people everywhere for the greed and bigotry of essentially industrialized Christian nations. Christ is often portrayed in the world's media and many of its televised churches, as if he were some kind of cheerleader for the American military-industrial complex as it crusades to crush all serious opposition once and for all. This film will suit that American mood - or that foul part of it that likes its Christianity muscular. It is as warlike and violent and macho and unthinking as any film you will see. And it has almost become unpatriotic to give it a thumbs down. If you are looking for the man who loved and saved the world you will not find him here. Perhaps no film could ever fully tell the story of Christ. This one doesn't even manage to retell one of the most central parts of it.
Description of The Passion of the Christ (Full Screen Edition)
The Passion of the Christ focuses on the last twelve hours of Jesus of Nazareth's life. The film begins in the Garden of Olives where Jesus has gone to pray after the Last Supper. Jesus must resist the temptations of Satan. Betrayed by Judas Iscariot, Jesus is then arrested and taken within the city walls of Jerusalem where leaders of the Pharisees confront him with accusations of blasphemy and his trial results in a condemnation to death.After all the controversy and rigorous debate has subsided, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ will remain a force to be reckoned with. In the final analysis, "Gibson's Folly" is an act of personal bravery and commitment on the part of its director, who self-financed this $25-30 million production to preserve his artistic goal of creating the Passion of Christ ("Passion" in this context meaning "suffering") as a quite literal, in-your-face interpretation of the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus, scripted almost directly from the gospels (and spoken in Aramaic and Latin with a relative minimum of subtitles) and presented as a relentless, 126-minute ordeal of torture and crucifixion. For Christians and non-Christians alike, this film does not "entertain," and it's not a film that one can "like" or "dislike" in any conventional sense. (It is also emphatically not a film for children or the weak of heart.) Rather, The Passion is a cinematic experience that serves an almost singular purpose: to show the scourging and death of Jesus Christ in such horrifically graphic detail (with Gibson's own hand pounding the nails in the cross) that even non-believers may feel a twinge of sorrow and culpability in witnessing the final moments of the Son of God, played by Jim Caviezel in a performance that's not so much acting as a willful act of submission, so intense that some will weep not only for Christ, but for Caviezel's unparalleled test of endurance.
Leave it to the intelligentsia to debate the film's alleged anti-Semitic slant; if one judges what is on the screen (so gloriously served by John Debney's score and Caleb Deschanel's cinematography), there is fuel for debate but no obvious malice aforethought; the Jews under Caiaphas are just as guilty as the barbaric Romans who carry out the execution, especially after Gibson excised (from the subtitles, if not the soundtrack) the film's most controversial line of dialogue. If one accepts that Gibson's intentions are sincere, The Passion can be accepted for what it is: a grueling, straightforward (some might say unimaginative) and extremely violent depiction of the Passion, guaranteed to render devout Christians speechless while it intensifies their faith. Non-believers are likely to take a more dispassionate view, and some may resort to ridicule. But one thing remains undebatable: with The Passion of the Christ, Gibson put his money where his mouth is. You can praise or damn him all you want, but you've got to admire his chutzpah. --Jeff Shannon
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