I saw the film on Monday, at a pre-showing. Technically, it was flawless. From beginning to end I was completely enveloped in the world of first-century Jerusalem, owing not just to the more common excellences Gibson exhibited (cinematography, effects, music, etc…), but also importantly to the linguistic environment. While the dialect of Aramaic developed for the film was necessarily only a scholar’s imitation of language we have only hints about, through modern Aramaic, I was completely sold on the fantastic realism of it. What a pure joy it was for me to hear the flow of the words, closing my eyes and imagining that some very similar audio streams were actually sent through the air and echoed off stone walls thousands of years ago. The Latin spoken by the Romans in the film was likewise a treat–spoken quickly and lively by the soldiers without the pomp of oration, it made me believe that it actually used to be the lingua franca of the world, not just something my classics professors made up.
The technical merits of the film were necessary conditions for its being great (not, of course, sufficient). What they did, essentially, was to free my critical mind from accusations of poor acting (not a hint of which ever appeared onscreen), or poor dialogue (which I would not have been able to understand in any case), so that I could pay attention to the story. And what I realized was that I had, for all the hundreds of times I’ve read the gospels, never heard that particular story before. Something like that is the only explanation, anyway, of how I could spend the bulk of the movie shaking and unsuccessfully choking back tears. The viscerality of the torture unmanned me and left me wide open, so that every last bit of sadness I saw in the film, or of beauty, or of symbolism, or of meaningfulness, or of pain, passed right through the usual barriers of intellectualism, or of decorum, or of self-consciousness, or of distraction, and rent my heart; there was nothing that could stop it, not even the embarrassment of crying in a movie theater (an embarrassment made more or less null since everyone seemed to be suffering it at one point or another).
Tears were not the only thing to be inspired unbidden–there was anger (never at the Jews, or even the Romans who executed the tortures, but more globally at the character of Lucifer and his damned actions that traced back all the way to his serpenting in the Garden, as well as at the evils of human nature that we alone seem to be responsible for) and also a sense of awe as all the things I’d ever heard about Jesus’ experience were realized on the screen. Most importantly, I was drawn to the character of Jesus in a way that I never have been before. For the first time, I looked at him and thought, “That’s how I want to be.” Sure, Christians say shit all the time about “being like Christ” or even how that is the goal of Christianity, but it was never compelling in more than a general way. To me, “being like Christ” was just equivalent to “being good” or “being like a perfect being”, and I have an awful hard time caring about being morally perfect. I suppose I never understood that, while “Christ” and “perfect being” might have the same semantic extension, their intensions are separated by an immense chasm. A chasm out of which somehow sprang the personhood of Jesus, to which I was drawn. I wasn’t, in seeing his skin flayed and his blood spilt, attracted to the perfectness of Christ. What perfectness there was was covered under ochre. But the blood and death–I can understand that because it is all around us, and if ever there was a man who embraced it like Jesus did in this film, that is a man I would follow.
So there is an account of what the film did for (rather, to) me–it compelled me to come to grips of a sort with what kind of person Jesus must have been like to do what he did, and I found, to my surprise, that I loved that person, so full of love himself, and purpose, awareness of cosmological tension and the power to relieve it. In other words, everything that a human is meant to be.
I have been trying to decide what I would have thought of the movie had I not already considered myself a follower of Christ, and it is difficult. Certainly, if one goes into the movie with an agenda of any kind (whether Christian [say, to be inspired or something useless like that], or otherwise [say, to tally up the possible anti-semitic sentiments]), one will miss the intended impact of the film. If one watches it, on the other hand, as one would watch any other story which she’s never seen before (recall your first viewing of Braveheart), it seems to me that the attraction of Christ is inescapable. This attraction, again, is not to any belief about the metaphysical structure of reality, or to any set of mysterious creeds, but to a person. Ultimately, that fact is what sets this film apart from all other Christian attempts at filmmaking, since it is the story of a human being–a story that can teach us about love, and perhaps even more about love than any other story–instead of a thinly-veiled excuse to moralize or evangelize.
In other words, get off your ass and go see it.
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