Posted on 2/24/2004, 2:09:38 PM by vannrox
The "very flawed" director wants us all to look deeply into "The Passion of the Christ."
By Steven Rea
Inquirer Movie Critic
BEVERLY HILLS - If you had a dollar for each time Mel Gibson said "This is not the blame game" during the week of Feb. 9, you could finance your own modest indie.
Encamped at the Four Seasons Hotel for a marathon of proselytizing and propaganda before squadrons of radio, TV and print reporters, the movie star and his team stayed steadfastly on message.
The Passion of the Christ - Gibson's self-financed $30 million reenactment of the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus, which opens in 2,800 theaters on Ash Wednesday - depicts a band of Jewish high priests as bejeweled schemers bent on killing the carpenter-turned-preacher from Nazareth.
For months, before anyone saw Passion - except the roughly 20,000 Christians, most evangelicals, whom the filmmaker invited to preview his work in progress - charges have flown. The most serious is that the interpretation set forth by Gibson, an ultra-conservative Catholic who rejects the 1960s reforms of the Second Vatican Council, will incite anti-Semitism.
The Pharisees, an influential Jewish elite, are cartoonishly evil, protested interfaith leaders, who read drafts of Passion's script and saw an early cut of the film. Responsibility for the crucifixion is laid squarely on the Jews, not shared with the Romans, they complained - and not just the high priest Caiaphas and his compatriots are guilty, but all Jews, for all time.
Inclusion of a passage from the Book of Matthew - "His blood be on us, and on our children," a curse attributed to the Jewish crowd in the Bible, but spoken by Caiaphas in the movie - incensed Jewish leaders who cited the Vatican's rejection of the blanket condemnation four decades ago. In the final cut of his film, in which the cast speaks only Aramaic and Latin, Gibson removed the line's subtitle. If you're up on your Aramaic, you can still hear it.
"OK, it may have alarmed people," says Gibson, worn but on message, in his suite overlooking a wide, smog-free swath of West Los Angeles.
But what the controversy has done, explains Passion's producer, director and cowriter, "is to make [audiences] look into their own faith. And it's made them look into the faith of the other person, too... . I think that it's bringing people together."
What the controversy has also done is generate reams of free publicity. For a film, and a distributor - the little independent Newmarket - working without a Hollywood studio's powerhouse marketing machine, the embroilment has been invaluable.
"I think that there's a lot of understanding to be had here, I really do. And" - Gibson goes sotto voce, to show his earnestness - "this is not the blame game, by God. This film is not the blame game. I so don't want it to be that... . Every man, woman, child that's ever breathed life on this Earth is a child of God. It's not about 'You did it!'... The film clearly says that we all did it. That's what I'm saying: All our transgressions did it. That's my belief - the tenets of my faith.
"Anti-Semitism? Pssssh. What is that? It's a deliberate abuse of people for being Jewish. I have no time for this. And, what's more, it's... a sin. It's wrong. You know, there have been crimes in the past, on both sides.
"This is the way of the world... . We're always going to have those ignorant people around, always." Gibson exhales a weary sigh. "But the way to defeat ignorance is knowledge. And knowledge defeats fear. I believe that this film is a step in that process."
The Passion of the Christ was shot in late 2002 and early 2003 in Rome's famed Cinecitta Studios, and in the southern Italian city of Matera. Gibson, who won an Oscar in 1996 for directing Braveheart, worked on Passion's screenplay with Benedict Fitzgerald, an erudite Italian- and Swiss-educated screenwriter (Wise Blood) who is also a conservative Catholic.
The men labored over the script for nearly two years, cutting and pasting passages from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and incorporating accounts and interpretations by other saints, nuns and religious scholars. In Rome, they attended Mass, in Latin, daily before going to the set.
"Mel and I had similar experiences of veering off toward the edge of an abyss. You know, caught up and seduced by all the secular temptations," says Fitzgerald, whose father, the poet Robert Fitzgerald, wrote the definitive translations of works by Homer, Virgil and Sophocles. "I think both he and I had reached the age where we're aware of how secularization has, perhaps, blinded us to some other aspects of our own nature that need to be fed."
In talks with media outlets from the Orange County Register to ABC's Primetime Special Edition (the crawl during the Diane Sawyer interview: "Mel Gibson - Is he a genius or is he insane? Tell us at wpvi.com"), Gibson has described the personal crises that brought him back to the religion of his youth. He discusses the time, 12 or 13 years ago, circa Lethal Weapon 3, when he seemed to have it all, yet thought of killing himself.
Like his character in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, a former minister who suffered a crisis of faith, Gibson had nothing to believe in.
"Hey, I'm still having a crisis in faith," says Gibson, 48. "It doesn't happen and then it's just over. I mean, it can take years... . At some point in that search you have to rely on just sheer faith."
Gibson's descent had to do with drinking, with drugs. He acknowledges that he has an addictive personality, and that, in the Hollywood spheres he inhabited, those needs were readily attended to.
"I don't think there's a person living that doesn't have to experience... that emptiness at some point, and really ask those big questions. Some get answers quick and some get answers slow, and there's no rule about that except that everybody has to go through it at some point."
The actor was taught his faith by his father, Hutton Gibson, a Catholic radical who continues to generate headlines for his Jewish conspiracy theories and his belief that Jews have exaggerated the Holocaust. Gibson has distanced himself from Hutton's more sensational pronouncements, but has never publicly rebuked his father.
"I'll slug it out, until my heart is black and blue, if anyone ever tries to hurt him," he recently told Reader's Digest.
"I was raised in a certain way," explains Gibson - the sixth of his parents' 11 children, and the father of seven - who financed the construction of a church near his Malibu home that adheres to the rituals of traditional Roman Catholicism.
"I always believed it," he says of his faith. "I just didn't practice it very well. Or I was only practicing, I never got it... . I'm very flawed, and very venal, and very human. I've got more faults than - I've got so many. Believe me, if I live to be 108, I'll still be laden with many imperfections.
"So for me, it's being able to recognize that, to realize that whoever created me... has made me like this for a reason, and that I am loved in spite of my brokenness. There's very little I can do about that brokenness on my own. I need help."
And so, his passion for Passion was born - out of a need to address his own frailty. Gibson cast James Caviezel, a soulful, strapping actor (The Thin Red Line, Angel Eyes), as Jesus - putting brown contacts over his blue eyes. Maia Morgenstern, a charming theater actress from Romania - and a Jew whose grandfather died at Auschwitz - plays the Virgin Mary. Monica Bellucci, the Italian costar of Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions, is Mary Magdalene. A Bulgarian actor plays Pontius Pilate, an Italian is Caiaphas. Caleb Deschanel, the four-time Oscar nominee and a Philadelphia-born Quaker, shot the film. Gibson, who earned $25 million each for The Patriot, Signs, and What Women Want, financed the film out of his own pocket.
Unlike Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, which died a quick death at the box office despite its pre-opening stir in 1988, Passion is expected to open strongly. Advance ticket sales have been huge; in some parts of the country, congregations are renting entire multiplexes. A marketing campaign directed at evangelical Christians has produced boxloads of Passion paraphernalia: lapel pins in Aramaic, "witnessing cards," posters, door hangers, prayer tracts, books, T-shirts, CD-ROMs. Despite its R rating and graphic, bloody depiction of the scourging of Jesus, the film is expected to have a long life as a Christian teaching tool.
About the movie's violence, Gibson - who cast himself as the soldier who drives the first nail into the hand of Jesus - concedes that "it's not easy to watch." Chunks of flesh fly off the back of Caviezel's Christ as he quakes, chained to a stump, while whips and weapons wielded by gleeful Roman torturers crack and pierce.
"Yes, it's very violent," he says. "I tried to do it lyrically. If it's going to be so hard, it needs to be beautiful, and it needs to be lyrical, which I've endeavored to do. If you're going to push somebody to the edge, make sure you're holding their hand while you do it."
Caviezel really was flogged - accidentally, twice - by stuntmen. He also separated his shoulder, suffered migraines from the crown of thorns, and endured hypothermia on the cross. Despite the extended, near-rhapsodic bloodbath of scourging and crucifixion, Caviezel, 35, says the film strikes a balance.
"Mel said to me, 'What I don't want to do is make people go numb... . Turning [Jesus] into hamburger meat isn't the point, it's just going to disconnect [the audience]... . ' He told me that what he wanted was to show who the man was, and still feel the trauma done to the body."
Caviezel, also a devout Catholic, says he turned down three previous offers to portray Christ because they were "watered-down" interpretations. But after meeting Gibson and experiencing his fervor, "I felt I had to. In an instant, I said yes."
The actor, who has six films set for release in the next 18 months, is unsurprised by the controversy Passion has produced.
"It is, by its nature, a controversial story," he says. Jesus "came like a sword, but He also chose His death, and this is a film that doesn't play the blame game, as Mel says.
"But I'll go further. It's a film that... transcends the religion and takes you to a place that asks you the questions deep in your soul... . I wasn't interested in making a film about blaming anyone other than myself." Maybe, as some have suggested, there are elements of anti-Semitism in the Gospels. "If that's the problem," Caviezel says, "then we need to have serious discussions, real open dialogues about our faiths."
Gibson, up in his hotel aerie, a little bug-eyed, talks about the other Christ films. He has watched them all, from The Last Temptation of Christ to The Gospel According to St. Matthew, from Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth to George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told. He makes a joke - another oft-repeated sound bite - about the old Hollywood epics' "bad hair."
The final 12 hours that Gibson offers - the Last Supper, Judas' betrayal, the arrest, the trial, the crucifixion - are "very different," the filmmaker says. "Hopefully, it will make people look more at themselves, [and] more at those who are not like them in a good way, for understanding, and help [people] look into the Gospels or the Talmud or whatever. Just to check these things out.
"Where's the downside? I don't understand it."
Because, dear Philadelphia writer, he's been accused of playing "the blame game" over and over ad nauseum. IF he hadn't said this repeatedly, your first line would have been something like this:
I've already got tickets to this movie, and just to spite the press and Satan, I hope it is a raging success and brings more people to Jesus.
It will be and will do just that and that is what all the weeping, moaning and caterwauling is about.
Whit regard to any other movie in history, that's called a "publicity tour." No bias here. I wonder if Scorsese's tour for "The Last Temptation of Christ" was similarly branded "proselytizing and propaganda"?
So do I and I don't think Mel Gibson has anything to apologize about.
7 days X 24 hours X 60 minutes X 60 seconds = 604,800
It takes approximately 2 seconds to say, "This is not the blame game", so if Mel stayed awake for the entire week and repeated the sentence continuously without stopping or pausing, he could say it 302,400 times.
Today, $300K won't go very far even for an indie. Of course, nobody can stay up for 7 days without sleep and talk non-stop, so it is humanly impossible for Mel to say that sentence more than 100,000 times.
What? Rea wasn't being literal when he wrote that? Never mind.
My Dad's homage to Heinrich Hoffmann's "Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane"
...and your Loving Dad is now closer to you than he ever was while on the Earth.
Perhaps I shouldn't admit this,
but that is the most stunning thing I've ever read on FR...
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