Gospeling the Cinema: Three Movies

The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese
The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson
The Gospel According to St. Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini

When last Ash Wednesday, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ opened in theatres across the country, reactions varied from piety to anger. I noted the furore, and gave some thought to why a movie, albeit one with a sectarian agenda, aroused so much comment. Recently I watched the DVD of this film, and went on to rent two other films on the life of Christ that had caused comment when they were released: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). I have now watched all three movies, more than once in the cases of Gibson's and Pasolini’s movies. I had seen The Last Temptation before, and the second viewing this time was enough to confirm my opinion of it.

To quickly summarize, I liked Pasolini’s film very much, I thought Gibson’s film was just good, nothing extra, and I found Scorsese’s film something of a mess. These verdicts were rendered as much as possible on the value of each as a film, an artifact of entertainment, and not on the quality of religious faith expressed. Of course, the subject is the life of the central figure of one of the world’s three most widely influential religions. The choice of subject entails all the emotion and faith and conviction of that religion. No person, film maker or filmgoer, can escape the awareness of the import and influence of the life of Jesus, son of god to the faithful, prophet to Jews and Moslems, and inescapable cultural fixture to everybody else.

The marketing strategy Mel Gibson employed in building interest in his film, holding preview showings for fundamentalist Christian church members, guaranteed religious debate about the movie itself. The debate broadened into considerations about the place of faith in a pluralistic society. Those considerations exist, but I don’t intend to address them. The emphasis placed by each director on differing elements of Jesus’ life give some indication of their beliefs, and I have noted them. I have no intention of judging any of the films on doctrinal grounds, to be exact.

I am a life-long member of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, as broad-based doctrinally a sect as you will find among “mainstream” Christian churches. While divided amongst ourselves on all sorts of doctrinal issues, we Episcopalians generally find it “tacky” to question somebody’s faith or insist on others believing as we do. And while we may be sinners in many ways, we Episcopalians are never tacky.

Episcopal clerics often characterize three “liturgical” churches, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox as each reflecting the influence of one of the major events in the Christian calendar. Episcopalians express the Nativity, Roman Catholics take Good Friday, and the Eastern Orthodox emphasize Easter. In considering The Passion of the Christ, I certainly can agree that the very Catholic Mel Gibson is true to the spirit of Good Friday.

Let me deal with the much-noted blood and gore that so dominates Gibson’s movie. I watched this movie with my beloved, my sweetheart, as tender-hearted a person as any I have ever met. Neither of us was sickened or had to turn away from watching the extremely long-drawn out scourging scenes, or the agonizingly filmed progress of Jesus up to Golgotha, or the excruciatingly detailed scenes of loutish Roman soldiers nailing Jesus to the cross. I do not believe this lack of revulsion on our parts was due to desensitization or inherent hardness of heart.

The very extravagance of Gibson’s effort undermined his intended effect. After the first ten or fifteen minutes of flogging, my willing suspension of disbelief became unwilling, and I began to wonder how long the makeup for Caviezel had taken each day of shooting. I wondered how the makeup people glued the gruesome scars onto the actor’s skin. I idly noticed the use of slow-motion during the ascent on the Via Dolorosa, when Jesus repeatedly falls, twisting and twisting for most of a minute. I compared the effect to the death scene of Bonnie and Clyde, and the massacre of the Wild Bunch. When the machinery of a film’s creation begins to show, the story loses a lot of its force. The palpable determination of Gibson to hammer home his passion for Jesus’ torment as the central event of the Gospels made us aware of the director’s hand in every scene.

In spite of the failure of the blood-soaked scenes of Jesus’ torment, Gibson has made a good film. The Passion is not more than good, not a masterpiece, but it is a well-crafted visual and aural object. The use of Aramaic and Latin, with English subtitles, actually worked better in setting the mood of actually being there than did the scourging and crucifixion scenes. The photography was wonderful throughout the film, muted colors and pervasive darkness reinforcing the somberness of the story Gibson has chosen to tell. Caviezel deserves some sort of award for his performance, if not for acting, although he does that very well, then for endurance. I think he has said in an interview that the extreme physical demands on him in this movie deepened his appreciation of Jesus’ suffering. I believe it.

Pier Paolo Pasolini made The Gospel According to St. Matthew in 1964. He used mostly non-actors, even in the major roles. I have read that Enrico Irazoqui, who played Jesus, was an economics student with no acting experience. Irazoqui supplies an intensity that meets the needs of his role nonetheless. The many peasant faces of the other cast members give the film the look of a documentary, a feeling that these are real Judeans and Nazarenes. The harsh, arid countryside and the crumbling, cliff-hugging buildings chosen as locations add to this feeling of being one step away from the real Jesus, the real disciples and family members.

The high-contrast black and white photography brings into sharp relief the gritty landscape, and the wrinkled faces of the cast. Both land and people seem scored by harsh forces of nature and man. These people, indeed, are the “salt of the earth,” and are tightly bound to it. Actors spend long minutes staring into the camera, presenting their worn and deeply seamed faces as mute testimony to the hard and bitter realities of their lives. These withered and desiccated faces turn to Jesus and soak up his words like clear, cold water.

If Gibson focused on the agony of Jesus, Pasolini presents Jesus as a fierce champion of the people of the sere, sun drowned landscape of the impoverished province of Judea, a backwater of the Roman Empire. Irazoqui strides through this landscape darting glances at his disciples, firing off dialogue taken from the Gospel according to Matthew. Jesus pauses only when he sees children and the shyly enthusiastic crowds that begin to meet him as he journeys. Most of the movie depicts the ministry of Jesus before he goes to Jerusalem for his final Passover. The Nativity itself is not shown; just a few scenes of Mary pregnant, then Joseph and Mary leaving Nazareth for Egypt after the Magi have visited. The massacre of the innocents ordered by Herod is filmed in one long shot, with babies tossed like bundles of rags, torn from weeping mothers. Pasolini is intent on presenting the teachings of Jesus, especially the emphasis on the two Great Commandments, love God and love your neighbor.

The arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus proceed in a matter-of-fact, understated series of scenes. No scenes of scourging, just the placing of a crown of thorns onto Jesus’ head do for Pasolini all that is necessary; he does not linger on the pain for as long as Gibson did.

The brief journey to the place of crucifixion also occupies little time. The crucifixion itself is presented in economical scenes that do not flinch from the pain and suffering of Jesus, but neither does Pasolini dwell on that final agony. There follows a brief scene of the stone rolled way, and the empty linens within the tomb as the wondering family of Jesus, and his disciples, look in joy on the evidence of resurrection.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a film about Jesus’ teachings in the context of conditions in Judea. This approach contrasts with the story of the redemptive sacrifice of the crucifixion presented by Gibson. Pasolini’s movie is much wider in treatment and wonderfully evokes the appeal of Jesus to the suffering poor to whom he preaches.

The Last Temptation of Christ is a film that I wanted to like. I admire many of Scorsese’s movies, and after the storm of protest and picketing greeting this film, I really tried to do my libertarian duty and admire this film as well. I did not find it possible to do so. Wonderful photography again, maybe it is something about the subject matter that turns cinematographers into Renaissance Old Masters, but here is another desert landscape and sepia-tinged groups of peasants.

Willem Dafoe does a good job playing Jesus as torn by his dual nature as both man and deity. I found the imagined life of Jesus with Mary Magdalene, springing from Dafoe’s conflict, to be a distraction from the story. The scenes are presented as a sort of vision or meditation Jesus has during crucifixion, at least I think that is the sequence. Things get confusing at several points in this movie, and at almost three hours there is plenty of room for confusion.

Barbara Hershey is good as Mary Magdalene. I kept having impious thoughts and feelings whenever she was on screen. I suspect that my distraction did not add to my appreciation of the movie as a whole.

Scorsese knows how to make movies, but even a very good director can lose his way.

So, in recap, three movies, one about suffering and sacrifice in blood, one about a ministry to the poor, and one about the conflicts of flesh and spirit in a man-god. All have much to recommend them, depending on what is expected when you sit down to watch an entertainment, which in the end is what a movie is. Even when the subject matter is dark and painful, we may still be entertained. The extremes of reaction to these three movies is a measure of how much we bring to the film experience from our own package of beliefs, our preferences in art, and how much we are willing to adjust in our thinking for the short time in the dark of the theatre. I enjoyed all three, in the proportions mentioned at the beginning of this little exercise.