Movie review: The Passion of the Christ ***

Jesus (jim Caviezel) carries the cross.

PHILIPPE ANTONELLO / AP

Couldn't we come back when the headlines are gone, when the box office is certain, when the intimate one-on-ones with Diane Sawyer are over, when the Jewish groups have long since decided wheather the film is anti-Semitic, when Mel Gibson has stopped dismissing criticism of his new movie as anti-Christian sentiment"?

Couldn't we come back in six months, when people have actually seen The Passion of the Christ, and judge it only then - when we can see it with a clear head and the gift of hindsight?

We can't. Not now. In the beginning theer was the controversy, and it was good for marketing. And now comes the movie, opening today. Ash Wednesday, and it's an admirable show of the faith of the filmmaker, and the craft of his crew, Shot in eerie wide-screen blues and luminous amber glows by the talented cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff), it never looks less than striking. But as a movie, as a work of art, which this ultimately must be, it's mostly fury.

Literal-minded fury.

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ - however you see it, and reaction will be as divisive as you'd expect - is a religious picture very much of its time. It's violent and extreme and serious and handsome and contentious and also strangely cold and self-defeating. You can read Jesus' messages of tolerance and foregiveness in snippets, in the subtitles, in the too-brief flashbacks that stud the main action, but you never feel it in the film. Gibson shows little interest in Jesus' breathtaking way with words; lost is what Jesus meant and how radical his ideas were; abandoned (or at least deeply obscured) is Gibson's original intention: that we bear witness to the suffering Jesus Christ went through, to the nauseating detail and pain, Christians believe, Jesus endured to save all people.

The brutality we get.

Jesus' message is mainly lost.

And gibson only gives Jim Caviezel, who looks just like the bearded classical image, mere moments to convey the electricity and charisma of the Messiah. Caviezel, though, for his part, through all the streaks of blood and heavy gashes of makeup, expresses a physical, noble suffering that's touching.

What you remember about The Passion of the Christ is not meditative at all but visceral, and bloody. It's numbing, frankly, not powerful (as early reviews have said) because the images are not connected to any hope or pathos, and therefore are rarely poetic; Gibson's eye is surprisingly cold, unemotional. Especially compared to the anguish on the faces of the cast.

It's hard to picture this as the work of a man of great spiritual insights, so lost is his imagery in the unrelenting brutality. I know, I know - Gibson wanted to put us right there alongside Jesus, from his arrest to his painful progress to Cavalry, and finally, his crucifixion.

Mary (Maia Morgenstern), left, and Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci) in <i>The Passion of the Christ</i>.

He has, in evocative detail. But it doesn't serve the film dramatically. The Passion begins well: In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is talking to his Father, when Satan, an androgynous creature with worms crawling from its nostrils, tries to tempt Jesus (the movie's Satan is most like the shrouded Death who played that famous chess match in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal); Satan asks why Jesus might go through with his inevitable suffering, insisting that man is not worth the trouble.

Then the Roman soldiers arrive with Judas to deliver his fatal kiss, and, beside the occasional memory of his idyllic childhood with his mother, the Last Supper, or the Sermon on the Mount, the next 110 minutes are a vivid retelling of a torture.

Not only is this not a picture for children, it assumes a large degree of your understanding of Christianity - he's preaching to the converted.

You come away not with a complete understanding of why Jesus offered himself up - but with a rather specific knowledge of how to murder someone slowly. The movie recalls Jesus' final 12 hours, and during that time he is bound, strapped with chains, fashioned with a crown of thorns, tossed over a wall, spat on, stoned, flayed, pierced, kicked, mocked, and has his arm torn from its socket. Jesus' eyes run red with blood.

Oh, and later, one of the criminals crucified with Jesus gets his eyes pecked out by a crow.

Also: In a scene that lasts more than 20 minutes, Gibson's camera glides along a table lined with whips and reeds and cat-o'-nine-tails fashioned with metal hooks designed to tear out chunks of flesh. We watch every lashing, and Gibson lingers over every rivulet of scarred flesh. You notice every drop of blood.

And here I think Gibson tips his hand unintentionally: The episode gets only a brief mention in the gospels according to Mark and Matthew and still becomes the centerpiece of the picture.

By the time Gibson reaches the crucifixion, the larger point of what Jesus stood for, if not what he endured, is an afterthought to the detailed horror. And to write that is painful.

But it's hard to truly love The Passion; on another level, though, it's also far from the bland, pious depictions of Jesus that Hollywood served up for a half century; it's nice to have a movie about Jesus with a point of view, rather than the typical Hollywood alabaster vision of twinkling Biblical skies and a Son of Man who seems to drift through scenes as a lamb. Gibson's intention of removing the phoniness and restoring some reality to the story is smart.

What he hasn't given up, though, are the schlocky New Testament villains of old. Here's where I'll address those charges of anti-Semitism: Is the film anti-Jewish? I don't think so; pretty much the blame is distributed evenly between the Jewish religious leaders, who see Jesus as blasphemous and (less explicitly) a threat to their influence, and the Roman power structure.

But the Jews do go about their prosecution in a mindless, rabid way here, under corny glowering stares that smack of caricature. And when they pass the buck to the Romans and the governor Pontius Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov), who attempts, in turn, to pass Jesus off on Herod, there's even more reason to raise an eyebrow.

Pilate is generally portrayed with a degree of compassion; here he's wary of trouble to an unprecedented extent, and not only conflicted, he's the only character in the film aside from Jesus allowed any nuance of feeling. As for the soldiers; they cackle and grunt more than the cast of WWE wrestling.

But will it lead to acts of anti-Semitism? My guess is the average anti-Semite doesn't need an excuse from Hollywood to practice anti-Semitism.

Gibson, if nothing else, deserves credit for putting his money (reportedly $30 million) where his heart and soul are. He's had a martyr complex as an actor and director: From The Year of Living Dangerously through the Mad Max films and up to his Oscar-winning Braveheart, he's been disemboweled, tortured, suicidal.

The Passion of the Christ, in context, is not a stretch. But his skill with a camera and atmosphere has improved. The film evokes grotesque Caravaggio paintings; horrific Renaissance art; and British Hammer horror movies of the '60s in equal order. His decision to use Aramaic and subtitles was unnecessary but it sounds fascinating in the finished product.

What he lacks is modulation: The film runs at one speed and with an ominous hum and feels broken off from a larger movie that's missing, one that made the film vital. The best movies about Jesus, and I'm thinking of Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, want to build a bridge between an audience that is indifferent and their religion; these are movies that argue for the necessity, and the vitality, of Christian ideals.

Gibson measures his devoutness in bloodshed. But, then again, if he wants to do a sequel, there's always the Spanish Inquisition.