The Watching of the Film

I finally saw The Passion of the Christ last night. God bless Netflix for affording me the opportunity to watch crap I can't be bothered to go out and see in the theater. (Speaking of which, I look forward to seeing The Revenge of the Sith next year.)

It's a terrible movie.

There was no tension or dramatic intrigue anywhere in the film. The only interesting characters were Pontius Pilate and Mary. Everyone else was flat and boring. This is supposedly the most intense series of moments of Jesus' life -- but the film offers no context as to help the viewer understand them. Now I knew everything going into the film, having been raised Catholic. To me the most interesting moment of Jesus' life is in the garden when Judas betrays him. He is alone. He is terrified. It's a very moving moment -- even if you don't believe Jesus was God, dramatically speaking a man understanding death is approaching and struggling with it is fascinating. Like the end of Glory. It's the stuff great films and plays are made of. But The Passion begins at this moment. And the rest of the film is anti-climactic.

Pilate and Mary were interesting. Gibson gives us an understanding (true or not, I don't know) that Pilate sees no reason to condemn Jesus, yet is under intense political pressures from Caesar in Rome to keep his territory in order -- as well as from his wife who believes Jesus to be a holy man. There are no consequences stemming from this last point, but still, at least in Pilate we have a character with real motivations and a complicated dilemma. And Mary (the mother, not Magdalene) was interesting because it's easy to empathize with a mother watching her son get the shit kicked out of him. This human struggle is all-too-common. Look at the dead US soldiers' mothers.

But again, we know nothing about Jesus except he gets all kinds of beat up. And Judas? Why did he do it? For money, sure, but WHY? There is no psychological understanding of him as we get with Pilate and, to an extent, Mary.

They basically took what should be the last 15 minutes or so of a film and spread it out over 2 hours. There is nothing compelling about it. It doesn't help you to understand Jesus any better.

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Lesser observations on The Passion of the Christ that may be re-hashed, but now that I saw it first-hand I must comment on:

- The whole anti-Semitism thing. Well, I suppose to do a movie like this you need to have some Jews as the bad guys. Jesus pissed them off. Makes sense. But is it really necessary to insert the devil among them -- thus equating Jews to Satan? I mean, the Romans ultimately had the power to kill him or not, AND they violently enslaved large parts of the known world, AND they were polytheists: but no devil? Imagine if "Roots" insinuated that all white people are the devil.

- Also, they get the most stereotypically-looking Jewish actors out there to play the angry mob, and then a very Christian-looking actor for Jesus? Jesus was Jewish, too, right? I want to see the film where Jesus is also a stereotype: has curly hair, a big nose, and says "oy" all the time. With Mary nagging him constantly.

- The Aramaic dialgue. I actually liked it.