The Passion of the Christ

In case you resisted the bloody charms of The Passion of the Christ as long as we here at Video Sewer did, we’d like to say that the movie fails on nearly all counts.

On the other hand, if you’ve already seen it, then you already have what is likely quite a strong opinion, and you’ll either think of writers at the Sewer as sleazy atheists, lazy opportunists, or hack-reviewers with a stack of non-church-sanctioned wheat-free communion wafers.

The Passion pre-supposes in the viewer an intimate knowledge of whatever book of the Bible from which it comes, (biblical scholarship being an obvious weak point of the Sewer ~ Ed.) and thus disposes of any explanation of the story. Heck, it even disposes with English, relying on Aramaic, Hebrew and subtitles.

Herein lays the first and foremost failure. Director Mel Gibson crafts Passion as the ultimate in poetic realism. It’s like the non-secular version of Flower of Flesh and Blood -a notorious faux-snuff film from Japan that forgoes any plot in its clinical, near-documentary-realism of the dismembering of an hapless Japanese lass.

Painstaking realism it is in the Passion, too. Use of authentic language, costuming and sets is augmented by the now world-famous slavish depiction of Jesus’ torture and execution, the creation of which is so carefully crafted as to instantly leave the world of special-effects and enter the realm of obscene cruelty.

So Jesus (we all know who he is, don’t we?) is betrayed straight off the bat and then flogged, flayed, beaten, kicked, spat upon, stabbed and crucified for the next two hours.

Where’s the story? Where’s the character development? If you aren’t a devout Christian or Catholic, there’s no basis to care for this quiet dude, who in a few flashbacks is hastily sketched out as saintly and wise. He’s just a stand-in for snuff-porno.

Regular readers will know the Sewer staff loves snuff-porno, but not when it’s put to such misguided use.

With The Passion of the Christ, Gibson misses the point entirely. Religious thought generally speaks of faith, compassion and the need to believe in the unseen. So what does Gibson do but set up a blank slate of a man to viciously shred - with gore that would make Tom Savini blush - in the ultimate ‘frenzy of the visible.’ There’s no space for compassion for Jesus the man, or Son of God, if that’s what you believe. There’s no faith in the unseen; from the first laceration of the skin, through the bloody, exposed ribcage, to the final shot of the resurrection, complete with CGI stake-holes through the hands, everything is explicit.

This just in case you might think that the resurrection was a metaphor, and not involving the actual body of zombie-Jesus, purified, deified, but definitely the same guy who went through Gibson’s hell.