Reviews (Spring 2004)

“The Passion of the Christ” (Mel Gibson): C-

Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is a one-hour film about the death of Jesus that, thanks to the vigorous application of slow-mo, takes more than two hours to unfold. Gibson establishes his method early on: When the treacherous Judas (Luca Lionello) betrays his Lord to the Jewish elders for 30 pieces of silver, the purse is not content merely to be handed over. Instead, it soars teasingly toward the camera, like a pigeon on peyote, before landing in the traitor’s hands with an ominous thud. All you need to properly enjoy the moment — to say nothing of the movie that follows — is a pair of 3-D glasses and a good, stiff drink.

That may sound like a rather glib assessment of a film that, over the past few months, has sold itself as nothing less than a sacred event — a Second Coming for the Cineplex. Gibson has gone so far as to brand his critics “the forces of Satan,” and without lending credence to that remark (the minion writing this review happens, incidentally, to be a believer), it’s worth noting that his attackers have indeed seemed almost supernatural, if not outright demonic, in their intensity. The media’s response to “The Passion” has been as replete with judgment, hostility and far-flung accusations as the book of Isaiah, from the early charges of anti-Semitism to later assaults on the film’s graphic, nearly fetishistic violence.

Granted, Gibson hasn’t exactly been turning the other cheek. It may no longer be fashionable to ask, “What would Jesus do?,” but it’s doubtful that schmoozing with Diane Sawyer or fabricating endorsements from the Vatican rank too highly on anyone’s list. The great irony of Gibson’s tactics is how much more imaginative, ingenious and worthy of sustained interest they’ve turned out to be than the film that inspired them. A movie needs a touch of the incendiary to qualify as a truly radical work of art, and “The Passion of the Christ,” for all its mock grandeur, turns out to be the squarest sacred event in years.

Though filmed entirely in Aramaic and Latin as a gesture of fidelity to the Gospels on which it is based, “The Passion” employs a traditional Hollywood-epic syntax that is at once stale and dispiritingly familiar. The result is a deeply conventional take on a man who, in his life and his teachings, thwarted convention at every turn. Even Gibson’s greatest undoing — his failure, or refusal, to challenge his audience spiritually — can be traced back to the laziness and inside-the-box thinking that typify mainstream moviemaking at its most neutered.

“The Passion” doesn’t bring us any closer to God than in its spooky opening, which introduces Jesus (Jim Caviezel) praying, anguished and alone, in the Garden of Gethsemane. A hooded, chillingly androgynous Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) slinks around in the shadows nearby; it’s not quite clear what she’s doing — writing a scathing movie review, perhaps — but whatever it is, the Messiah doesn’t take the bait. Within minutes, Jesus has been arrested, manhandled and carted before the Sanhedrin, the elite Jewish council that solicited Judas’ betrayal from the beginning.

Is “The Passion of the Christ” anti-Semitic? Certainly these Pharisees, with their fattened, oily faces and gilded robes, are the clear villains of the story, and with Satan and her seemingly endless brood of demon-babies still skulking about, that’s saying quite a lot. The Roman soldiers are the ones who will eventually flay Jesus like a Turkish rug before leading him on his death march through Jerusalem, but we’re meant to perceive them as brutal, mindless cogs in a corrupt machine. Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov), the Roman governor who balks at his decision to have Jesus executed, is painted as nothing short of saintly. It’s Caiphas (Mattia Sbragia), the Jewish high priest, meanwhile, who calls out for Jesus’ death, pushing mercilessly for what he perceives to be a blasphemer’s rightful punishment.

The sin here is one of omission, not distortion. Gibson and co-writer Benedict Fitzgerald could have done more to contextualize the reality that the Pharisees — who, to put it bluntly, don’t come off much more sympathetically in the Bible than they do here — persecuted Jesus not because they were Jewish, but because his gospel threatened their station, their authority and their ongoing mistreatment of the poor and oppressed Jews around them. (The constricted 12-hour time frame, even with its frequent flashbacks to Jesus’ childhood and ministry, is an immediate compromise.) But what is most striking about Gibson’s crude, one-dimensional portrayal of the Jews is that it’s of a piece with all the other portrayals in his altogether crude, one-dimensional movie — and that extends, most damagingly of all, to the character of Jesus.

I say character because I’m not convinced, as a churchgoer or a moviegoer, that the mystery of Jesus’ identity — the strange, furious alchemy of God and man in coexistence — is something that an actor can render with any justice. Whether or not you believe in the man’s sovereignty is finally irrelevant; “The Passion of the Christ” insists on it, and on that level Jim Caviezel’s performance is a spectacular failure. Caviezel, whose soulfully beautiful face is already starting to resemble hamburger meat by the 20-minute mark, may not deserve an Oscar, but he surely deserves a medal of bravery. You can see why Gibson chose him; his Aramaic, though obviously imperfect, has a lilting lyricism, and his performance throughout radiates dignity, commitment and sacrifice. But this interpretation doesn’t ennoble Jesus or lend any meaning to his turmoil. It reduces him to a medieval torture victim, a series of noble-suffering gestures and pained reaction shots, and Caviezel, bless his heart, has little to do except cringe on cue.

That’s why the notorious scourging scene, when the Roman soldiers tie Jesus’ wrists to a pillar and lash him until his bare back looks as if it’s been turned inside out, is actually much less disturbing than advertised. The horror is all in the buildup, the leering close-ups of first the whip, then the cat-o’-nine-tails, its barbed cords specially designed to rip and cling to human flesh. But once the flogging actually starts, it’s all too easy to dissociate the real Jesus from the mass of pulpy prosthetics and fake blood being battered and abused on screen. The spectacle is graphic and excessive — more than deserving of the NC-17 rating it should have received from the MPAA — but it is not upsetting. It does, however, go on forever. And just when you feel you’ve had enough, the slow-mo kicks in, and Gibson, like all directors who believe that slow-mo amplifies rather than nullifies the drama, topples over the brink into self-parody.

Ultimately, the problem with “The Passion of the Christ” is not that it’s violent, sadistic and offensive. (In fact, precisely the opposite is true: Given its provenance, it isn’t violent, sadistic and offensive enough.) The problem is that Gibson, as he demonstrated whenever “Braveheart” left the battlefield, is a leaden, pedestrian filmmaker with no discernible talent for dramatizing a story visually. Laboring under the misapprehension that because there is nothing subtle about his material there need be nothing subtle about his approach, Gibson literally stylizes “The Passion” to hell and back. Working with editor John Wright (whose last contribution to the medium was “Rollerball”), he slows the action down to a crawl, the better for an audience to supply thought and emotion where the movie hasn’t bothered to provide any. He floods the soundtrack with that distinctly female combination of singing and wailing that has become aural shorthand in Hollywood for “the Middle East.” And when Jesus at long last takes up his cross and begins his long walk toward Calvary, Gibson hits notes of kitschy overstatement that haven’t been sounded since Cecil B. DeMille parted the Red Sea 50 years ago.

Jesus is so emaciated by this point, and so continually abused by the soldiers around him, that he can barely move or breathe. They beat him, he falls. He falls, they beat him. The scene is convincing without being in any way compelling, and it quickly devolves into arch repetition. At the risk of sounding insensitive, how many times does Jesus have to stumble in the road before we stop thinking about his exhaustion and start marveling at the careful timing and rehearsal that must have gone into Caviezel’s acrobatics? How many bloodied close-ups of Jesus’ face do we need before we start admiring the splendid makeup job on his swollen eye? How many times does the camera need to lurch sideways into the crowd, jeering and spitting in unison, while Jesus’ mother, Mary (Maia Morgenstern), and Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci) struggle to hold the same agonized expressions for the better part of two hours?

It’s telling that once Jesus is finally bound, nailed and strung up on the cross, Gibson doesn’t have a clue what to do with him. Coming on the heels of an hour-long torture session, it feels like the last thing a crucifixion should feel like — a respite. The next six hours fly by, brushing over Jesus’ final words like a bulletin at a Good Friday service: first the salvation of the thief on his left, then the vinegar-soaked sponge on a stick, then at last the despairing cry of “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?” Read any of the four Gospels and those words are primal, wrenching. They turn to dust in Caviezel’s mouth. The line illustrates a basic teaching of Christianity that “The Passion,” with its bullying, can-you-take-it aesthetic, never even comes close to addressing — that the abuse of Jesus’ body, while intense, was in the end the least of his pains. Just as the sensation of nails being hammered through flesh was a pinprick compared to his willful and necessary abandonment by the Father, so his physical death was nothing compared to his emotional and spiritual death. But words like “emotional” and “spiritual” are of limited use to Gibson. His movie may mark the dawn of a new genre: the secular Biblical epic.

As of this writing, “The Passion of the Christ” has raked in $212 million at the box office and counting — so what do I know, right? Surely the film’s word-of-mouth fascination, its status as a bona fide religio-cinematic phenomenon, testifies that it is not only engaging viewers but forcing them to scrutinize and reflect on their beliefs. I have no doubt that many will find the experience unbearably moving, and some may convert within days of seeing it. More power to them; it was Jesus, after all, who taught us that no one, and nothing, is beyond redemption. Not even the films of Mel Gibson.

“The Dreamers” (Bernardo Bertolucci): C+

Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” opens on a lustrous, sun-drenched vision of Paris in the spring of 1968. A young American traveler named Matthew (Michael Pitt) is making his way toward the Cinémathèque Française, the glittering movie palace where he, like so many around him, spends his days in captivation by the films of Renoir and Resnais, Godard and Truffaut. We are in the thick of the French New Wave, and the air is ripe with both the hot flush of mass cinephilia and — not long after the government shuts down the Cinémathèque and forcibly ejects its founder, Henri Langlois — the first youthful stirrings of political revolt.

What’s a lonely, isolated, Susan Sontag-reading academic to do? Too much of a pacifist to take pleasure in the ensuing demonstrations, Matthew befriends Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), a pair of intense and equally film-obsessed Paris natives who, we eventually learn, just so happen to be brother and sister. Theo and Isabelle are so taken with their new friend, this foreign yet kindred spirit, that they invite him over to their apartment for dinner, then extend his stay indefinitely when their parents leave town on a brief vacation.

The Cinémathèque may be closed, but “The Dreamers” proves more than willing to fill in the gap. Like Matthew, Theo and Isabelle are walking repositories of Hollywood trivia; they’re so punch-drunk on the language and lore of cinema that that they have, in no small way, reshaped their lives into a patchwork of lofty references. The film indulges their obsession: When the three run like madmen through the Louvre, Bertolucci fluidly intercuts their bodies with the same black-and-white images from Godard’s “Band of Outsiders.” And when Theo and Isabelle elaborately re-enact scenes from their favorite movies, from “Queen Christina” to “Scarface,” we catch fleeting, almost subliminal glimpses of the original footage — life imitating art, art imitating art, and so on, to the point where the film seems to have drifted into a dream-state of its own.

“The Dreamers” yearns to be an expression of movie love at its purest, but its nobler intentions can only hold one’s attention for so long. Matthew soon begins to notice, with both unease and mounting curiosity, that his hosts are considerably closer than even twins have any reason to be. Isabelle, in particular, makes a bizarre habit of kissing the sleep from Theo’s eyes every morning — not an entirely unreasonable service, considering that they sleep naked in the same bed. The relationship stops just short of actual incest, but the games they play are no less shocking: Failure to correctly guess a movie reference becomes grounds for immediate and humiliating sexual punishment.

You should have an inkling by this point — and if not, there’s the movie’s well-deserved NC-17 rating to remind you — of what happens next. “The Dreamers” was adapted by Gilbert Adair from his own “The Holy Innocents,” an ironically titled book that is reportedly even steamier than the finished film. Still, in the annals of screen nudity we are unlikely to find a more effective or ebullient work of arthouse titillation than “The Dreamers”; even when set beside the director’s previous envelope-pushers like “Stealing Beauty,” “Last Tango in Paris” and “1900,” it’s a ravishing standout. Bertolucci’s gaze is everything. No one would describe “The Dreamers” as innocent, much less tasteful, but even in its most candid moments the film has a bracing purity. When Theo and a nude Isabelle corner Matthew and subject him to a ruthless strip-down, the camera swoops and hovers over their flesh in a way that manages to revel without leering — it’s not just a spectator, it’s a graceful participant. Bertolucci may be 64, but the unity of spirit and intent he achieves with his trio of young actors is both breathtakingly intimate and completely intoxicating.

The downside, alas, is one heck of a hangover. Ultimately, the scene that determines how much you will appreciate “The Dreamers” has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the film’s exaggerated sense of its own intelligence. Interrogated at dinner by Theo and Isabelle’s poet father (Robin Renucci), Matthew launches into a five-minute philosophical discourse on the endless geometric continuities between a cigarette lighter and the tablecloth pattern in front of him — possibly one of the most sustained space-outs ever captured on film. It’s an amusing speech, and like everything else in “The Dreamers,” it’s also pleased with itself to the point of suffocation. The movie’s uninhibited sexuality is its prime achievement; its insistence on also feeding us ideas, ideas that we should find valuable or interesting rather than vapid beyond belief, is almost touchingly naïve. Imagine a pole dancer pausing every so often in her gyrations to deliver a lecture on existential theory, and you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to watch “The Dreamers.”

Can a movie boast a glorious ménage à trois and still keep its wits about it? Sure it can; just look at “Y Tu Mamá También,” where the sex scenes were as stimulating as the politics. But the boys in that picture were horny adolescents, not horny pseudo-intellectuals; their rites of passage burned with authenticity. In the navel-gazing universe of “The Dreamers,” we are expected to believe not only that Matthew and Theo actually engage in forceful debates about Eric Clapton versus Jimi Hendrix or Chaplin versus Keaton (the movie accommodatingly supplies a scene from “City Lights”), but also that their dialogues have originality, meaning and purpose.

Here is where the movie’s towering pretension collapses in on itself. Pitt, with his blondish good looks and willowy frame, resembles nothing so much as a poutier Leonardo DiCaprio, yet short of DiCaprio himself, I can’t think of another young actor less equipped to convey intellectual passion. We don’t get the impression that Matthew has absorbed a minute of Keaton in his life, much less cracked a single cover of Cahiers du Cinéma (with GQ on the stands, why bother?). Theo and Isabelle are even more insufferable, given to pointless moodswings and almost surreal bouts of kinkiness; when Matthew and Isabelle have at each other on the kitchen floor and Theo provocatively decides to fry up an omelet, you can all but see Bertolucci drooling over the outré little tableau he’s cooked up. Nonetheless, Garrel and Green make an ideal match, not merely because they look alike but also because their eyes seem to bear traces of the same sadistic glow. As Matthew wryly notes, “It’s like you’re two halves of the same person.” With one brain to go around, presumably.

It isn’t long before the unsteady tangle of relationships begins to shift and mutate. The film makes it clear that Theo is jealous of his sister’s new lover, yet it also hints at, though never dramatizes, the seductive undercurrents that course unspoken between the two men. Because the characters are so psychologically thin, lacking in any intriguing neuroses aside from an inexhaustible desire to shock, this plays out even more tediously than it sounds. When the movie’s political angle finally takes center stage, as the revolution literally moves from the streets into the apartment, “The Dreamers” plunges toward a coda every bit as heavy-handed as the government oppression it decries — becoming, in essence, the movie that Theo and Isabelle have always wanted to lose themselves in.

It must be said, by the way, that Bertolucci’s command of technique is nothing short of masterful, and so seamless that you’re almost tempted to overlook the larger banalities of his content. The apartment, every room seemingly a different burst of color, is a magnificent creation, both a relic and a wonderland. What impresses is the way Bertolucci’s eye cunningly navigates its premises; whether tracking through doorways or snaking down a red-lit corridor, his camera’s every movement carries an erotic charge. If for no other reason than this gorgeous mausoleum of a set, “The Dreamers” deserves to be seen. Whether it should be heard is another matter entirely.

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