The things a movie can do: first The Passion of the Christ was sure to spark waves of long-latent anti-Semitism throughout the country, then it confirmed the lack of enlightenment within one of Hollywood's elite (especially since he refused to explicitly distance himself from any of his father's unorthodox historical, cultural, and theological proclamations), then it became a moral obligation for all upstanding members of the Christian community to go see it, then it started breaking box-office records en route to becoming the most successful independent and 'R'-rated film of all time, defying all prognostications. Who would've thought a film could climb so aggressively up the rankings of the most profitable motion pictures with so hubristic a tagline:

"Under a master director and the reverent genius of great players, the story of Christ has taken human form and greater understanding!"

Oh wait, that was on the posters for the 1927 King of Kings by Cecil B. DeMille.

Younger filmgoers may find it hard to believe, but just as Moulin Rouge! didn't invent the screen musical from scratch, the cinema had a history of adapting the Bible for entertaining the masses long before Mel Gibson felt called to express his faith on celluloid, and not just in equally controversial incarnations like Dogma or The Last Temptation of Christ. Hollywood raked in the dough decades ago with Kings and its 1961 remake, The Robe, both Ben Hurs, The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Ten Commandments, Anthony Quinn's turn as Barabbas, The Silver Chalice (Paul Newman's screen debut), and Jesus Christ Superstar. Monty Python had their own indelible take on the Gospels with The Life of Brian; Jesus of Montreal spun a more secular version of the Passion Play; and even homosexual Marxist Pier Paolo Pasolini cranked out one of the best tellings of the Christ story with his Gospel According to St. Matthew. This is all to say, it's been done before, and in none of those instances was the end of anyone's world hastened by the treatment of such a sacred subject.

In this contemporary age of religious hypersensitivity, there's one thing about Gibson's production on which everyone can agree: you can't buy that sort of pre-release publicity. Months before Passion started unexpectedly filling multiplexes, the press had analyzed from every possible angle the notion of a Hollywood superstar (Best Director Oscar® notwithstanding) daring to tackle a subject everyone felt was too personal for public consumption. My friends and I would forward to each other article after article on the Web addressing its theological inaccuracies, its civic irresponsibilities, its medieval foundations, its racial implications, its violent indulgences, its commercial limitations, until we all admitted to a case of Passion Fatigue and waited for the darn thing finally hit the screen.

But until then, I thought I'd educate myself on this genre of Jesus Flix that had long since fallen out of fashion; viewing three domestic iterations from different decades shows how any cinematic translation necessarily expresses a wholly selective approach to Christianity's central events. And after a marathon program consisting of DeMille's silent Kings, which proved that even the most solemn of tales could make for a thrilling spectacle, to 1965's The Greatest Story Ever Told, which dares people the Gospels with Hollywood's biggest names, to 1961's remake of Kings, which boldly amplified the political underpinnings of Christ's tale into an action-packed extravaganza of Jewish revolutionary heroism, by the time Passion came around there was little arguing that Gibson had hardly gone where no film crew had gone before.

Frances Marion, a reputable Hollywood screenwriter in the twenties and thirties, mentions in her memoirs that the release of the "overwhelming" King of Kings "caused quite a furor in the picture colony and which spread rapidly across the country." Will Rogers, she writes, "outdistanced the critics when he said, 'There will never be a greater picture because there is no greater subject.'" DeMille's introductory intertitles invoke sufficient veneration to suggest that sometimes a movie is more than just a movie:

"This is the story of Jesus of Nazareth…He, Himself, commanded that His message be carried to the uttermost parts of the earth. May this portrayal play a reverent part in the spirit of that great command."

And then we immediately find the glamorously venal Mary of Magdala pouting upon her chaise - for her paramour Judas Iscariot has gone missing. Her fawning clientele inform her he's gone off with a "band of beggars led by a carpenter from Nazareth," to which she declares, "This carpenter shall learn that He cannot hold a man from Mary Magdalene!"

Thus does DeMille play fast and loose with Scripture from the outset, an act of narrative license shared to varying degrees by virtually all the films surveyed. In the interests of bringing His (as DeMille does in all his intertitles, I'll capitalize the 'H' as is traditionally done in third-person references to the Christ) story alive on the screen various liberties are often taken, such as Mary's involvement with Judas. Another scene has a young Mark (he whose name one of the Gospels bears) being healed of a bad leg by the Son of God during the early days of His adult ministry, which also seemed highly apocryphal to me - but a phone call to the Reverend Mark Verbruggen, pastor of the Georgetown Christian Reformed Church in Ontario, Canada (and a former college roommate of mine), revealed that there are legends suggesting Mark wrote himself into the story. So it would appear these movies can also drive home certain Scriptural elements we'd previously ignored - and thank goodness for seminary graduates to help up distinguish the more fanciful instances from the solidly canonical ones.

Those who can muster little enthusiasm for silent pictures will at least find them less semiotically taxing when it comes to Biblical fidelity, as DeMille often simply quotes passages directly from the Gospels (with attribution) for his intertitles. Other intertitles expand on what was more subtly embedded in the text, like this description of Judas Iscariot: "…the Ambitious, who joined the Disciples in the belief that Jesus would be the nation's King, and reward him with honor and high office." (Per Rev. Verbruggen, he was indeed "looking for a political savior.") "Would he but shun the Poor, and heal the Rich, we could straightaway make Him King," Judas thinks aloud, "with me on His right hand!" (Judas is, of course, the only conventionally handsome member of the Disciples - and with his alluringly underdressed lover Mary Magdalene, both provide a visual commentary on the hollow value of external glamour in the eyes of Christianity - even though this is the very quality Hollywood relies upon to sell tickets.)

Then there are the Jews, whose chief representative gets about as bad a rap as everyone would later fear from Gibson's version. The Shylockified High Priest Caiaphas, for example, "cared more about revenue than religion - and saw in Jesus a menace to his rich profits from the Temple." There's no Biblical reference for that particular intertitle, nor when scriptwriter Jeanie Macpherson later has him mourn of the crucifixion, "let it be upon me - and me alone!" And when the Temple veil is rent in two before his eyes, he again begs, "Lord God Jehovah, visit not thy wrath on Thy people Israel - I alone am guilty!" (His remorse suggests he is at last convinced of his rival's divinity, which is undocumented.) DeMille's to be commended for avoiding broad ethnic condemnations virtually a century ago, whether intentionally or otherwise, but to reduce the fulfillment of Christ's mission to the machinations of one man alone may oversimplify the tale as egregiously as would blaming all practitioners of a specific religion.

DeMille naturally finds opportunities for his signature flourishes of bread and circuses, such as the meticulous lighting scheme that ensures Jesus always emanates a mild glow, or when Mary Magdalene is exorcised of the ghostly seven deadly sins, or when Jesus towers over a modern city at the end, declaring "Lo, I am with you always," but he pulls out all the stops at the moment Jesus gives up his spirit on the cross, and all hell breaks loose on Calvary. The skies grow furious, and the earth immediately splits open into great fiery chasms into which hundreds of people fall, as well as the tree from which Judas' body was hanging. (DeMille has Judas watch all of Jesus' sufferings from a high hill until the very end, and even has him wracked with pain each time Jesus is flogged, an ingenious bond that, alas, is nowhere to be found in Scripture.)

You can imagine anyone would be convinced this was the Messiah after such carnage, but clearly His ultimate plan wouldn't be revealed until Easter dawn, which DeMille brilliantly films in full color. He also displays an appreciation for understatement, though, in the scene where Jesus is surrounded by children: a little girl presents him her wooden doll, whose leg has broken off, and she asks if it was true He could heal bad limbs. (Jesus the carpenter promptly pins the joints back together.) And when Jesus withdraws from the mob that tries to crown him their earthly king and takes a moment to be alone in the Temple, here's where King has the Devil side up to Him (as an old man in black robes) and tempt Him with the trappings of political power, a conflation of events probably made necessary by the dictates of economical storytelling.

It bears noting that Hollywood was considered the most iniquitous of communities at this time, its pre-Hays Office industrial output blamed daily for the corruption of society's moral standards, and to put on such a devout production represented a blatant campaign of image repair from which Janet Jackson might learn a lesson or two. (Publicists never failed to mention that Mass was said each morning before the day's filming began.) H. B. Warner's almost-blonde Jesus is always rather subdued in expression, never exuberant but always likeable; it's not an uninspiring portrayal, but subsequent interpretations clearly kept this benchmark in mind in their attempts to add some fire and earthiness to the Son of both Man and God.

Will Rogers would be echoed in the title of George Stevens' ambitiously packaged The Greatest Story Ever Told, to whose locations United Artists must have sent every player they had under contract. Claude Rains as Herod orders the slaughter of Bethlehem's children, Jose Ferrer as Herod Antibas takes his place on the throne of Judea, Shelley Winters and Ed Wynn are cured of blindness, Sal Mineo is healed of his crippled legs, Van Heflin witnesses the resurrection of Lazarus and delivers the news to Jerusalem, Victor Buono plots and schemes as one of the Sanhedrin, Telly Savalas gets a plum role as Pontius Pilate, Sydney Poitier helps Jesus carry His cross up Calvary, Jamie Farr's one of the Disciples, Pat Boone's in there somewhere according to the video jacket, Angela Lansbury gets about two seconds as Pilate's wife, and yes, John Wayne's single line of misbegotten dialogue at the end is already plenty famous. If the whole Jesus business doesn't interest you, you can at least play Name-That-Celebrity for all of Story's 225 minutes and never get bored.

You know a film has grand aspirations when it starts with a shot of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling frescoes - it would surprise no one if the makers of Story hoped to equate their own creation with other classic works of Biblical art. And the film isn't at all bad to look at - there's plenty of time to have Jesus and his Apostles wander about among striking rocky vistas and preach the Beatitudes with a splendid backdrop to keep your eyes charmed. It's a pity the Jews can't appreciate the exteriors quite as enthusiastically - they're pretty downtrodden under foreign rule, and in between massacres by the Romans they pray for a "deliverer," a "Messiah," the "Promised One."

Stevens has a far more turgid reputation than DeMille as a director, but he does manage some clever touches, such as the foreshadowing when Joseph and Mary and their newborn return to Nazareth to find the roads lined with the crucified à la Spartacus. And when the locals stand around looking dejected and bereft, the burnt offerings and sacrifices they continue to perform are clearly meant to represent a bankrupt spirituality sorely in need of reinvigoration. Enter John the Baptist in the river speaking of the arrival of a new era, and Jesus steps forward looking not quite sure yet of what He's getting into.

The Jesus of this film can finally speak out loud, and when He does, He sounds more than a little kooky and cultish. His words are already plenty familiar to contemporary audiences, but with Max Von Sydow's slight accent among all these American actors He sounds just not-of-this-place enough to give Him substantial dramatic presence and make it all sound as radical as the Jews must have found it back then. (And, thankfully, there are no "Thees" and "Thines" in this version.) We've even got some witty dialogue when He's recruiting His Disciples - such as when He first meets Matthew (Roddy Macdowell) the tax collector:

"Have you anything to declare?"
"Only myself - and my Father."
(Looks around) "Has He anything to declare?"
"Yes - His love for you."
"Well, I very well can't tax that, can I?"

But none are more suited to their role than Charlton Heston, who embodies a very muscular Christianity as John the Baptist. When Herod's soldiers arrive to imprison him for treason, they find an utterly unrepentant servant of God waiting for them:

Centurion: "I have orders to bring you to Herod."
John: "I have orders to bring you to God, heathen."

Upon which ensues a watery melee where John doesn't try to resist arrest, but instead tries to forcibly immerse his captors in the baptizing waters of the River Jordan. Heston's unapologetic portrayal is, frankly, enormously edifying, even though later audiences will find his furry garb all too similar to his later Planet of the Apes wardrobe.

Some scenes, such as when Jesus heals the crippled Sal Mineo to walk, communicate surprising psychological verisimilitude (Sal hesitates at first, because what if it doesn't work, and he looks like a fool? - and then his first steps are quite tentative, since he has to adjust to a whole new crutchless center of gravity), but Story takes a few liberties of its own with the Gospels. The most creative is how Jesus crosses paths now and then with a rich man named Lazarus - the one whom He advises "where a man's wealth is, there his heart is" - who gradually gets sicker and sicker as the film progresses. And when it is reported that his illness was ultimately fatal, he becomes the selfsame Lazarus Jesus subsequently raises from the dead - as though Jesus knowingly let him deteriorate, so that his illness could be "for the glory of God."

Another recurring character is that of Satan, whom Jesus encounters during his solitary sojourn in the desert. Like in Kings, the Devil takes the form of an old man, but here he pops up to cause mischief at pivotal moments, such as agitating the crowd to demand Pilate send Jesus to His death, or later pestering Peter publicly until he famously denies any affiliation with Jesus. And finally, Stevens cuts some corners by having Judas Iscariot simply toss himself into the Temple pyre at the moment the first nail goes into Jesus' hand, and three days later having the Disciples suddenly remember the old prophecies about a sacrificial lamb coming back from the afterlife, and they rush to Jesus' tomb to see if they were referring to their own Rabbi.

We don't get a lot of insight this time around into Judas Iscariot's motivations, and the storm at Jesus' death isn't half as spectacular as DeMille's, but Stevens does adequately relay the larger forces at work behind Jesus' condemnation. Here it's clear the Jews couldn't believe their Messiah could be laid so low - the savior they were expecting would surely emerge victorious against the occupiers who've subjugated His people. Story renders clear just how badly the Jews wanted a hero of a more conventional sort, and when Jesus failed to meet their expectations, He had to be sacrificed at the altar of their collective disappointment. It's Jesus' mere humanity He's punished for, instead of due to the insidious conspiracies of Kings' High Priest.

Kings skips Herod and Bethlehem and the Three Kings and John the Baptist and jumps right in with Jesus' work just prior to the Passion, while Story tries to be more comprehensive and fits in the Christmas story and offers a little background on Israel's lack of independence; Nicholas Ray's even bolder in his 1961 King of Kings and attempts a sweeping summary of events during the Inter-Testamental period so we know exactly what sort of political atmosphere Jesus would be born into. It's unfortunate that the best scripter Philip Yordan could do, though, is subject us to the world's longest opening exposition. I'll reproduce below verbatim all that narrator Orson Welles asks us to digest before any character even says a word on-screen - it's been vetted by the Rev. Verbruggen, so it's at least as reliable as it is logorrheic:

"And it is written that in the year 63 B.C. the Roman legions, like a scourge of locusts, bore through the East, laying waste to the land of Canaan and the kingdom of Judea. Rome's imperial armies, a tumult in the hills, struck Jerusalem's walls in a three-month siege; breaching the gates, these legions laid the dust of battle with a shower of blood.

"Under the eye of General Pompeii, the Holy City fell, the people strewn like wheat in the harvest time of Rome. While Pompeii, triumphant, dared take the last high place - the still-living heart of the city - the Temple. Here on this most sacred ground in all Jerusalem, now Pompeii's horse took its way. Where no pagan had ever set foot, in the court of the priests, most irreverent Pompeii stood himself down.

"At last, here was the fruit of the harvest; here, it was said, lay the treasure-house of Jehovah, great statues of gold as bright as the sun in this ancient land. So Pompeii, burning for the touch of precious metals, entered the Sanctuary. But entering, Pompeii found only a scroll of parchment, the covenant with the one God, handed down by Moses, and venerated through the years.

"Thus for more than fifty years after Pompeii's invasion, the history of Judea could be read by the light of burning towns. If gold was not the harvest, there was a richness of people to be gathered; the Italians of Caesar Augustus brought in the crop. Like sheep from their own green fields, the Jews went to the slaughter. They went from the stone quarries to build Rome's triumphal arches, but Caesar could find no Jew to press Rome's laws on this fallen land. So Caesar named one Herod the Great - an Arab of the Bedouin tribe - as the new false and maleficent King of the Jews.

"But from the dust at Herod's feet, rebellions of Jews rose up. And Herod, in reply, planted evil seeds, from which forests of Roman crosses grew high on Jerusalem's hills. And Herod the Great, passing pleased, bade the forests multiply. Yet trapped in this darkness the Jews survived, by one promise: God would send the Messiah to deliver them forth."

That's a piece of work, and plenty instructive, but when you're selling tickets on the pretext of 70mm, Technicolor, and Stereophonic Sound, sounding like a history book won't exactly hook them in. There is a point to all this, though - Ray's carefully setting the stage for not one, but two parallel tales. While Pontius Pilate slowly winds his way to his new post here in Judea, and Joseph and Mary return from Egypt with their child, there are ten thousand rebel Jews in the hills looking to throw off the yoke of Roman rule. And their leader? None other than Barabbas, whom you may have come to know as a mere thief and murderer, but the Rev. Verbruggen points out that in Luke 23 he was labeled an insurrectionist.

Kings definitely knows its Biblical minutiae and runs with it, significantly expanding Barabbas' role into an explicitly political and corporeal counterpoint to Jesus' more abstract promises of Jewish liberation in another world. We later learn Barabbas' first name is also Jesus, cementing the link Ray's trying to forge between the two freedom fighters. (According to the Rev. Verbruggen, Jesus was a common name back then.) While Barabbas' terrorist cells make mischief on Roman soldiers with their slingshots, Jesus delivers his Sermon on the Mount to adoring crowds, but Barabbas isn't buying it. In his underground enclaves forging weapons for a climactic assault on Jerusalem's conquerors, he mocks the presumptive Messiah's radical notion that "could not love and brotherhood be used as weapons against the Romans?" Kings' setup is clearly, as one character puts it, "which Jesus do these [people] choose?"

Since three decades had passed without a Hollywood studio attempting any sort of Biblical adaptation, MGM hedged their bets by offering both "A Story of the Christ!" and plenty of rip-roaring revolutionary swordplay. What is increasingly clear, however, over Kings' two and half hours is how not about Jesus this becomes. Ray introduces Lucius, Pilate's right-hand man, who spends the film slowly being won over by the Christ (he's appointed Jesus' advocate during his first hearing with Pilate) at the same time he's fending off Barabbas' assaults. There's also plenty of intrigue between Herod, Salome, and John the Baptist, and this time around Judas Iscariot gets analyzed to within an inch of his life - it turns out he's in cahoots with Barabbas, and they plan on co-opting Jesus' Temple appearances during Passover, taking advantage of the masses' nationalist fervor, and storming the Roman strongholds once and for all. And when that doesn't go as planned, Judas betrays Jesus "to test the divine power of the Messiah" in the hopes at least one of his leaders will do something explicitly triumphant.

All this historical drama is certainly plausible, if a little too Hollywoodized for certain tastes; what's for certain is that this mixing of elements makes for a decidedly less meditative experience than with the other films. Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus (a redhead this time) and Robert Ryan as John the Baptist (as stiff as ever) generate neither the gravitas nor the humanity necessary to communicate what's at stake (and the scene where Jesus visits John in jail has the most tenuous Scriptural basis yet); Ray's reduced it all to a spectacle with no spiritual point of entry. It all looks like the producers put their millions to good use in recreating an ancient world, but there's no Lazarus, virtually no Satan, and only the most primitive staging of the occasional miracle.

We lose sight of the Christ in what was ostensibly His own movie - overindulging the campaign to "liberate the Hebrew nation" may successfully erase any indictment of the Jewish people when Jesus meets His unpleasant end, but it also reduces Christ's sacrifice to a footnote in the annals of Jewish history. When "The King of the Jews" is posted atop His cross, it's meant here to be a comment on the Jews' dim prospects for independence, rather than a declaration of what was, for many viewers, nothing short of the truth.

Which brings us, finally, to The Passion of the Christ, which in the opening quotation makes no bones about the significance of His suffering and death: "by His wounds we are healed," states Isaiah 53, regardless of your degree of Jewish patriotistic fervor. And like the first King of Kings, Gibson chooses to enter the Gospels at a very specific point, during Jesus' period of anguish at Gethsemane, as He cries up into the strikingly black night for His omnipotent father to "rise up, defend me." And along comes yet another black-robed figure in the role of Satan, but no old man this time; it's instead a hairless and pale androgyne who suggests His divine plan is surely flawed: "Do you really believe that one man can bear the full burden of sin? No one man can carry this burden, I tell you. No. One. Ever." (All while a single maggot subtly slithers in one nostril.)

Thus Passion takes an immediately theological approach, explaining for the under-churched exactly why this terrible ordeal must begin, and telegraphing Gibson's hopes that the Message not get lost in excessive reverence over the main character, or the visual opulence of a prestige picture, or the political stratagems of an oppressed people. And if you haven't heard already, it's all spoken in Aramaic - "Peter" sounds like "Kay-Fa," for example, and our Lord, it turns out, knew Himself as "Yeshua"; the Romans also converse in Latin, appropriately, and it's to Gibson's credit that all this dialogue in dead languages eventually proves not to distract from the proceedings. Of course, if this sort of cultural fidelity is meant to lay a claim to a greater historical authority concerning these events, then Passion's creators are guilty of the same arrogance as, say, the folks who made Left Behind.

When Judas Iscariot leads the High Priests' sentinels to their target, everyone struggles against them except Jesus Himself; though He comes along willingly, his captors rough Him up anyway during the entire walk back, as though they need to see for themselves that the so-called Messiah is actually physically vulnerable. Gibson makes his directorial hand evident in these opening scenes with the occasional slo-mo, and adds one gratuitous flourish that's already a little over the top: crossing a bridge, these bullies slap around the chained Jesus hard enough that he goes over the side, falls several yards, then dangles just above the ground like an ill-equipped bungee jumper - and who should be sitting there under the bridge riddled with a harrowed conscience than Judas Iscariot, confronted once more with the face of He whom he delivered unto the lions.

Though proceeding in media res, Passion does occasionally make use of flashbacks to Jesus' earlier life both in Nazareth and in the days of his ministry, which provide an effective contrast of earthly joys to the unending distress the rest of the movie has in store for Him. In the first instance, we see Jesus intent on His work in His carpenter's studio, fashioning a set of tall-legged tables and stools, and Mary scoffs that "This will never catch on!", upon which Jesus splashes water at her. It's a touching scene featuring the sort of mundane exchanges that reflect both individuals' humanity and the scope of their imminent mutual loss. In another recollection when Mary witnesses her aggrieved son stumble along the Via Dolorosa, Gibson provides a glimpse of that most maternal of moments when Jesus as a child also fell, and what mother wouldn't rush to their son's aid? "I'm here," she says both times, trying to make it all better: It's an effective familial device that conveys how this monumental event brought pain on both a cosmic and an individual scale.

Thus Jesus is already a mess by the time He's delivered to Caiaphas' midnight tribunal, with one eye swollen shut. And though it's clear that most of the High Priests present are single-mindedly determined to erase Jesus from the picture one way or another, their outrage at His various unorthodox theological declarations may merely reflect that of the gathering crowd; it's certainly not beyond belief that Jerusalem's moral majority was enormously threatened by this affront to the status quo, and whatever comes out of Jesus' mouth would sound nothing short of blasphemy. Jesus accordingly knows full well He's sealed His doom when He finally agrees before everyone that yes, He's the mighty Messiah they've all been waiting for; one good eye is all that's necessary for a tear to make its way earthward, and all that He needs to gaze at Peter (who's clearly terrified by the mob's violence) when He hears him immediately disown Him.

Jesus is brought to Pilate, who recognizes just what a powderkeg this whole affair has become in his province; "If I don't condemn this man, Caiaphas will start a rebellion - if I do, His followers will," he predicts, which hardly cuts as tyrannical a figure as the Romans do in the second Kings. Anxious of adding to the civil unrest, Pilate is disinclined to "cause an uprising," suggesting their occupation is more tenuous than Nicholas Ray would've had us believe. He thinks he has an out in invoking the annual tradition of offering them a choice between two candidates for amnesty: Barabbas is an obviously poor choice in this film, as he's little more than a raving monster, and hardly the cunning insurrectionist as portrayed in Kings. But not even this works to his advantage, and having to concoct another outlet to release civil tensions, but not willing to outright crucify Jesus, Pilate orders He be "chastised" - "and make it severe."

And thus the fun begins. And here's where any charges of Passion's anti-Semitism are laid to rest; for however self-interested and reactionary the Sanhedrin may have behaved, it can't hold a candle to the outright inhumanity and sadism of the Romans. When Jesus' scourging gets underway, first with sticks and later with a glass-shard-tipped cat-o'-nine-tails, the savagery of His punishers are beyond what even they can stomach. When strips of flesh and muscle are methodically torn off to reveal bones, and the blood-spattered courtyard resembles nothing so much as a gory Pollock canvas, even these animalistic soldiers take pause to reflect on the degree of brutality they're party to. And yet, if their flayed charge continues to stand up as He does, they surmise their job is not finished, and their sickening continued frenzy guarantees He'll be beyond the help any of that era's medical care. (It's Mary who makes clear, though, that regardless of the Romans' unchained bloodlust, it's her son who decides when enough is enough: "When, where, how…will you choose to be delivered of this?")

"Behold the man," says Pilate to the crowd when the ravaged Jesus is returned to him - as in, that's all He is, folks, He clearly bleeds, hasn't this been enough? Of course not, and though the local masses demand his death, and Jesus is sent on His way toward Golgotha, there's no excuse for the continued abuse by the Romans as they escort the condemned to His final destination. This is the overwhelming impression Gibson delivers in Passion, that these Latinophone Italians are less than human, with their relentless thirst for barbarity, and if there were any of them still around you can bet their Anti-Defamation league would've made a stink. There isn't a moment that most of them don't clearly relish being beyond the law, and though it wasn't the Romans who got the ball rolling, surely those who so enthusiastically execute the will of the people can be no less guilty?

Gibson's editorializing comes forth in another flashback where he has Jesus look straight at the camera to say "They will persecute you" (Gibson's own feelings of victimization have received much media attention), and when he has Jesus fall down for the hundredth time it's long since exhausted its dramatic potency. And when Jesus finally drags Himself upon the cross, one finally wonders just how many indignities Gibson was capable of thinking up for his subject, and if it isn't a poor reflection of contemporary society that such horrors are so casually conjured? They pop His shoulder out of its socket to extend His hand to the designated nail hole; they flip the cross over to bend the nail tips back, as if to say "you aren't going anywhere"; and when Jesus says "Father, forgive them," his swollen face renders Him barely articulate, and He looks barely human. It's enough to make you wish for the age of DeMille, Stevens, or Ray, who probably couldn't even conceive of this stuff.

Gibson's point is that all this ugliness is the cumulative effect of sin, all of which Jesus is suffering to shoulder, and there's no possible softening of such an endeavor. But the degree of violence and cruelty that Passion delivers is nothing if not obscene; even if this sequence of events is absolutely central to the Christian faith, this film shouldn't have received anything less than an NC-17. (Like I said about The Exorcist's re-release a few years ago - what parent would take their kid to such a film, even if the MPAA would let them?) Of course, I'm underestimating American audiences' tolerance for the cinematic depiction of bloodshed - it's sexual content that is worlds more controversial in this country, but we're long since inured to whatever causes the body pain instead. My title for this essay playfully uses the alphabetical shorthand for Christ in describing this whole genre of films, but it also suggests what the penultimate segment of the Gospels should itself be rated, and we have Gibson to thank for finally showing to what degree the Romans' bloodlust mirrors our own - they simply liked their slaughter a little more than virtual.

Caleb Deschanel's cinematography is second to none, which makes Jim Caviezel's eyes glow faintly red, the blood dripping off the crown of thorns gleam like candy, and the Devil unceasingly ghoulish, but one wonders if the Academy next year will touch this film with a ten-foot pole. (Who will they risk offending more - the still-protesting pockets of the Jewish community, by honoring the film with even one Oscar® nomination, or the previously-untapped market of millions of theatergoers who all flocked to this film, by giving it none?) The Pietà at the film's end is somewhat elementary, the earth and sky's shudders at Jesus' expiration are still but a shadow of DeMille, and the resurrection is a poorly-executed afterthought, but none of those elements of the story was Gibson's priority.

His central point is the moment when Jesus finally despairs upon the cross, when He asks God in so many words if He wasn't supposed to be dead by now, because wasn't that the goal of this venture? Passion's looking for that instant when the Son of God is finally broken, because without His feeling utterly abandoned, the sacrifice is not complete. It's an illuminating focal point for a movie, to be sure, but it's also a vicious one, and we can only hope another filmmaker comes along one day who can mount an effective rejoinder showing what all that blood, sweat, and tears was ultimately for.