At the Movies with Robert Hawkes

Coincidentally with the approach of Easter, a friend persuaded me finally to have a look at Mel Gibson`s The Passion of the Christ, a film which I had avoided, on the occasion of its first release, because I found the surrounding \"controversy\" and other hoopla so transparent a marketing ploy that I just couldn`t bring myself to hand over the money. But at my friend`s urging, I got a copy from the public library and had a look. Films about some or all of the life of Jesus have been popular since the earliest days. The genre reached its apex in the silent era with Cecil B. DeMille`s King of Kings in 1927 - a treatment as scrupulously reverential as any, but with all the wonderful gusto that characterizes the best of the first few decades of the motion pictures. Enthusiastic and shameless movie-making on a grand scale. The 1960`s saw something of a spurt of renewed interest in the topic, perhaps after the success of such `50`s Biblical epics as The Ten Commandments, producing a new King of Kings in 1961, with Jeffrey Hunter in the title role of a film which came to be known, amongst its detractors, as I Was a Teenage Jesus. It is thoroughly antiseptic and plastic from top to bottom. The Greatest Story Ever Told followed in `65, aiming for slightly more dignity with a rather dark Jesus played by Max von Sydow (!), but weighed down by a distracting parade of big-name stars in even the tiniest speaking roles. The film has a remarkable wrongness of \"look\", seeming to have been shot in and around the Grand Canyon - actually mostly Utah. The last notable film account of the Savior`s whole life is perhaps the TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth, directed by no less a light than Franco Zeffirelli, which features a very attractive performance by Robert Powell as Jesus, but which also features the same distracting parade of \"stars\" in the minor roles. What most of these films, and others on similar topics, seem to share in common is (a) an almost comical similarity of musical accompaniment, instantly recognizable as \"Jesus movie music\", and (b) an almost unrelieved dullness. I do not mean that they suffer from slow pace; sometimes slow pace is exactly what the doctor ordered. They seem often to have no pace at all, as though somehow the sanctity of the material absolved the filmmakers from their obligation to impose narrative structure or to make film cinematic. Say what you will about Gibson`s treatment of the man`s last few hours - and who hasn`t? - we can say that while it still suffers from the pre-packaged music syndrome, it is at least not dull. Au contraire: it is at great pains to make itself \"exciting,\" and to look rather like an action film, for example with its endless reliance on good old slow-motion photography as a cheap short-cut to real focus. And just as, in the typical action film, Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mr. Gibson himself will suffer terrible injuries and assaults without concussion, shock, or fatal internal bleeding, so Mr. Gibson`s Jesus survives, during the first five minutes of his arrest, being tossed over a bridge to be caught in his chains - without apparent fracture of bone or rupture of vital organ. If Gibson`s point is to emphasize the suffering of Jesus as a human being, he ought perhaps to present us with a real human being rather than an action hero. It is certainly in the film`s favor that the actors speak in the original tongues of the time - a noble gesture toward authenticity indeed. But in that case, why are the speakers of Latin speaking it with sound changes that didn`t occur until the Middle Ages. And how much do we actually know about the pronunciation of Aramaic anyway? Certainly some of the actors seemed much more at home with all of this than did others, and in the end, one has to judge the \"original language\" element as noble in intention but suspect in integrity and uneven in execut