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The dark screen filled with the printed words of prophesy from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, written four hundred years before Christ: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities. By his stripes we are healed.”
There was, in the two hours that followed, much wounding and crushing, and, when the lights came back up, there was some wiping away of tears. I found the film riveting and quite disturbing, and I was struck by an insistent memory from a Jesus movie from my childhood, George Stevens's “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” In the final scene, the risen Jesus, wispily played by Max Von Sydow in a pageboy haircut, levitates in the clouds as a heavenly choir sings the “Hallelujah Chorus.”
Gibson had undertaken “The Passion of the Christ” with the avowed purpose of contravening the overwrought piety of such conventions, and in that, certainly, he had succeeded. Gibson's resurrected Christ rises in the tomb with a steely glare, and then strides purposefully into the light, to the insistent beat of martial drums. With that, Gibson's Passion story, and perhaps even, the controversy that has attended it, became clear. Gibson had once said that he wasn't interested in making a religious movie, and in “The Passion of the Christ” he hadn't. He was making a war movie.
Gibson's story line reflects the basic Christian narrative of Christ's Passion, as it is laid out collectively in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus of Nazareth is a Jewish carpenter in Roman-controlled Palestine, who preaches a message of love and forgiveness, with an increasingly messianic subtext. During the Passover season, he enters the Holy City of Jerusalem, where he is welcomed by adoring crowds who hail him as the long-promised Messiah, bringing deliverance and a new kingdom. But Jesus is considered dangerous by the Jewish high priests, who conspire to arrest and try him, and then deliver him to the Roman prefect Pilate for execution, on the ground of treason against Rome. Jesus knows that his fate is the Cross, and briefly wishes to avoid it (“Oh, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me”); but he also knows that God, his father, sent him into the world for the very purpose of dying, as a sacrifice for the redemption of all mankind.
script for “The Passion of the Christ” was the New Testament, and that the film was directed by the Holy Ghost. Movie audiences, though, will doubtless see in it the hand of the man who directed “Braveheart.” On one level, Gibson, who has been working on the film for more than a year, perceives The Passion of the Christ as a heroic action story, and the principal quality he hoped to instill in it was the power of realism. “I wanted to bring you there,” he says, “and I wanted to be true to the Gospels. That has never been done.”
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