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There's something to be said for trying to rescue Jesus from the tepid, greeting-card Good-Shepherd image he's often trapped
in -- as though he were some cheerfully bland Disneyworld guide to the Heavenly Kingdom -- but little to be said for the way
Mel Gibson has gone about it. By concentrating monotonously on the violence of the Passion story, Gibson violates the rules
of good drama and does an injustice to the simple, powerful narrative of the Gospels, which unfolds without bitterness or
sensationalism, and is all the more powerful for that. Gibson layers in a lot of non-Biblical nonsense from later Church
mythology -- such as the notion that Mary Magdalene was one of the fallen woman befriended by Jesus in the Gospel texts --
and, by making the bad guys, Jews and Romans, so grotesque he misses the idea that we are supposed to identify with them and
share their guilt. Jesus gets beaten to a pulp in the first few scenes of the film and the beating, luridly dwelt upon, gets
repeated over and over again. It's good to be reminded that Jesus's crucifixion was meant to be understood as real, not some
mythological ritual, but the point of the Passion tale is not to make us feel sorry for Jesus -- it's to place the suffering
of innocence at the center of the moral universe. This Gibson has conspicuously failed to do, despite a few moving scenes
mostly involving Jesus's relationship with his mother. These scenes humanize and particularize Jesus far more effectively
than all the flesh-ripping episodes combined. One admires Gibson for his commitment to this unlikely project but wishes he'd
paid more attention to the storytelling genius of the compilers of the Gospel texts.
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