So I saw “The Passion of the Christ” yesterday; my parents asked me to see it, and I wanted to be able to talk about it intelligently rather than on hearsay. Well.

The film is basically nothing more than a Catholic-fantasy version of Christ’s last hours. In fact, it owes more to Catholic dogma and tradition than it does to either a strict scriptural or historical interpretation. You can just see Mel and his screenwriter with their Stations of the Cross pamphlet, spinning out some dialogue here and there to flesh things out (forgive the pun). And as such, between the obsessive faithfulness to Catholic tradition and Mel’s fanciful embelishments, the elements in the original scriptures that seem either melodramatic or just hard to swallow are exaggerated to the nth degree. We see a man tormented by a bald, vaguely androgynous Satan (hmm, don’t remember that from the Gospels), whose betrayer Judas is then taunted by a crowd of demonic children (!) before hanging himself with a rope taken from a rotting donkey corpse; a Christ beaten within an inch of life, first with long sticks and then with cat-o-nine-tails, the blood smearing the stone floor like something out of Gus Van sant’s “Psycho,” yet somehow able to stand up moments later and then carry a cross several miles UPHILL (which is so heavy that we are later shown 4 strong Roman soldiers heaving just to PICK IT UP), all the while bleeding what appears to be a veritable Red Sea, only to somehow be nailed to the cross (incorrectly; nails were actually driven into the arm just below the wrist and not through the palms, as is shown in the movie) while the bad-guy criminal on the cross next to him gets his eye pecked out by a raven (apologize to Edgar Allen Poen, Mr. Gibson). Spike this concoction with dollops of bombastic music, gallons of slow motion to complement the blood, and you get a film so deep with manipulative overkill that it’s a wonder that at the end of the film we don’t see James Caviezel look into the camera and say, “Ouch. I suffered for your sins.” The final effect is, irony aside, deadening.

If this film was done as a tool of evangelism, it’s a sorry piece of work indeed. But I don’t think it was. As I said, to me it just seems like a Catholic primer, a Cliff’s Notes version of the Passion so you can watch the movie if you don’t have time to read the Book before tomorrow’s test.

We aren’t given much context for what we’re seeing (the Sermon on the Mount gets a 30-second flashback for example, and the resurrection gets boiled down to a single shot). So as it is, we get roughly 90 minutes of brutal torture and humiliation, 25 minutes of serious and doleful faces, and 5 minutes of credits (mostly for special effects involving prosthetics and fake blood).
If you took this plot and transplanted it to a different era and changed the character names, the violence would cause the film to get an NC-17 rating and Sean Hannity would be shake his head over “the entertainment industry’s moral depravity.” But I guess that when you’re on God’s side, the ends justify the means.

Is the film anti-Semetic? That criticism is too narrow. This film shows a blanket disgust for humanity. With the possible exception of Pilate (whose political Catch-22 is about the only interesting angle to the film), every character, including Christ, is as one dimensional as a religious tract: the solemn suffering Christ, tearful pious Mary, evil snarly Roman soldiers (who come off like particularly sadistic frat boys), sanctimonious Pharisees. But why offer living, breathing characters to an audience when time-worn dogmatic cliches will suffice? After all, we wouldn’t want to surprise the audience with anything resembling a fresh perspective on this story.

If you’re really interested in this, see Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” instead; he may have been a gay atheist, but even he did a more convincing job portraying Christ’s divinity. Or Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” which at least is provocative enough to force the audience to question what they believe. Mel is preaching to the choir with this one, so it’s no wonder the choir is forking it over.