But Gibson is so fixated on Jesus' suffering that spirituality is only a footnote. The strange thing about "The Passion of the Christ" is that Gibson doesn't seem particularly interested in proselytizing: His movie is clearly made for the people who already "get" Jesus -- by itself, it's not likely to win Christianity any converts. Part of the problem is that we have very little sense of Jesus as anything other than a victim. We see him in a few fleeting flashbacks: Caviezel is very cannily cast, because when his Jesus isn't suffering, he's spiritually and sexually magnetic. In a very brief scene, we hear him telling his followers to love their enemies -- What good is it to love only those who love you back? he asks -- and his words seem so sensible and grounded that, Jew or Gentile, believer or non-, you might find yourself leaning forward to listen.

But Gibson cuts away from the scene with a "That's enough of that" efficiency, back to more scenes of Jesus being beaten, bloodied and humiliated. For Gibson, religious belief is clearly some kind of endurance test. That may be inherent in Catholicism itself: I remember, when I was a young and rather devout Catholic child, asking my mother why Protestant churches had crosses but no bloody Jesus figures hanging from them. She explained that Catholic iconography was different from that of other Christians, which suggested to me (and probably to her, a Catholic convert who knew how the other half prayed) that garden-variety Christians were all well and good, but we Catholics really knew the score: To be a Catholic, you had to be able to take the heat -- to accept the nature of Jesus' sacrifice in all its bloody glory. You couldn't go to Mass, or get to the end of your rosary, without having to reckon with the blood he shed.

Gibson, in a stroke of what can only be called marketing genius, has shown his movie to members of select religious groups over the past few months, and he's made much of the fact that it has found favor not only with Catholics but with Christians of many stripes, particularly conservative ones. It obviously hits some angle of Jesus' story that they feel needs to be stressed. But I think that, strangely, Gibson's fixation on Jesus' suffering actually diminishes it in some ways. I say that because, in Catholic school in the 1960s, the suffering of Jesus was treated as a type of pain almost beyond our comprehension: Picture the worst kind of physical suffering imaginable and multiply it by 10 -- that's how bad it was.

Gibson has chosen to go for realism here -- realism defined, that is, from what we can glean from the Gospels, which is relatively very little, but never mind that. By spelling out every detail of Jesus' suffering (and including plenty of go-for-broke camera shots, like one of a nail poking through the back of the cross, dripping glossy blood), Gibson has turned that suffering into a kind of cinematic laundry list. The images are so relentless they become numbing; paradoxically, as the details pile up, they become more of an abstraction than concrete proof of anything. We're reminded that human bodies -- even the body of Jesus, whom the Catholics believe to be both God and man -- can handle only a finite amount of abuse before they simply give out. We're left with a fairly clinical understanding of the pain Jesus endured, but there's no spiritual glow to the mystery of his sacrifice; if it's there, it's caked in so much dried blood that we have no sense of it.

And none of this, of course, answers the question that's on everyone's lips: Is "The Passion of the Christ" anti-Semitic? If you can look beyond the Pharisee baddies, I think the answer is that Gibson is too zealous in his own beliefs to allow much space for anyone else's. It's a "My faith's bigger than yours" approach -- as if he believes that by being the loudest man in the room, he'll somehow make himself the only one.

That is, of course, his right. If you're a believer in the one true faith, any work of art (or, more accurately in this case, propaganda) you put out there is going to have a slant as pronounced as a lightning bolt. Even so, flipping back through some of the images that Gibson so brashly put on the screen, and reminding myself how many times I wanted to look away, I can't help wondering: In the same position, what would Jesus do? And if he flinched, would he be any less of a man?

Recent Stories