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   Thursday, March 04, 2004

THE BASHIN' OF THE CHRIST

Everyone else has an opinion on what Josh calls "the big Jesus movie" so here's mine:

Ugh.

I don't go into a film about the death of Our Lord and Saviour looking for the feel-good hit of the summer, but this movie is the grimmest, goriest, ugliest thing I've seen (and I own "Dawn of the Dead" on DVD). A priest who shops in our store was annoyed by my dismissal of this film, insisting "that's the way it happened. What do you expect?" To me, this is like saying we need a movie about the bombing of Hiroshima that spends half its running time on lovingly-filmed shots of melting, dying Japanese people. No thanks.

What frustrated me about the film was that the relentless brutality was occasionally broken by brief flashbacks of a pre-whipping-post Christ tending to his disciples and his followers. The audience gets a fleeting glimpse of the grace and compassion of this great prophet before being yanked back into Catholic torture-porn. Wouldn't this have been a better, more valuable, more educational film had that ratio been reversed? A film that celebrates Christ's life and teachings before the inevitable (and briefer) scenes of horror?

I told Father John that I still consider "The Last Temptation of Christ" to be the film to see. Martin Scorsese's film is thoughtful and complex, wrestling with the dual nature of Jesus as both God and man. The priest rolled his eyes and said, "It's humanist tripe!" Perhaps. But it still felt more true to me, more real, than this sickeningly cruel, context-free death-of-Christ epic from Mel Gibson that shows us too much but teaches us little.

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