Friday, March 05, 2004

The Passion is a more realistic film than its uneasy antecedents in the way that last year's remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was more realistic than the original. It is a tribute to X-treme Acting and special effects, to writhing and rubber. How utterly depressing, in an age of still-virulent fundamentalisms, to see the greatest story ever told, one of them at least, portrayed in terms that limit, rather than stretch, the imagination.

Christian doctrine is nothing if not subtle. Like the life and death of Christ, it inhabits that twilight world between the human and the divine. It nestles, at times uneasily, between the mortal blackness that is Good Friday, and the unlikely triumph of Easter Sunday. Gibson, with his fleshy version of the Passion, goes nowhere near that awkward space. Look, he says; this was a nasty story. Nastier that Lethal Weapons 1, 2, 3 and 4 put together. And you will, nail by nail, be forced into compassion for this tragic figure.

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Hollywood, with its cheap addiction to supernatural redeemer figures, ironically finds it hard to deal with the most supernatural, most redeeming figure of all. Jesus was no X-Man. And Gibson, in turn, fatally confuses realism with truth.

10:56 AM |