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The Passion is a hard movie to review
because it was a hard movie to watch. Like a couple of dozen million people, I went with
a group from church to see it the first weekend the movie was in full release. That was
not really a typical Saturday night movie crowd, so it’s hard to relate what a “normal”
audience’s reactions would have been. That group of believers spent the bulk of the
movie in tears.
I say the movie was hard to watch for a couple of reasons.
First, the subtitles took away from the viewer’s ability to really get absorbed into the
plot and drama of the movie. It’s not that anyone around me was reading them aloud, but
it’s hard to let go of reality and become engrossed in a movie when you’re busy thinking
about the words on the screen. That’s a fairly minor complaint, though. The constant
brutality toward Christ (played by James Caviezel) made it difficult to keep my eyes on
the screen. My fiancée spent over half the movie with her head buried in my chest. In
fact, she squeezed my arm so hard that it took a week for the bruises to go away. It’s
simply hard to watch a man take a beating for nearly three solid hours. Add to that the
realism of watching a cat-o-nine tails ripping flesh from ribs, and you understand how
grueling it was to watch. The movie was also hard to watch because I understood the
significance of what Christ was going through and why he did it, but that might not be
true for an average moviegoer.
The movie shows the last twelve or so
hours of the life of Christ. It assumes that viewers know that Jesus had spent nearly
three years wondering around Judea, preaching a radically new and different version of
the Holy Scriptures—which is the reason the Jewish religious leaders wanted him silenced.
It does show in great detail Christ being captured by members of the synagogue security
force and taken before the local Roman ruler for trial. The audience gets to see him
beaten to a bloody mess and tormented before being nailed to a cross to hang until he
dies. His resurrection is shown too, but only as a closing shot that comes off
flat.
To me, the biggest flaw is that the movie didn’t do enough of
explaining why Christ put up with the beating and the agony of crucifixion. It would
have contained a more powerful message if we had been shown more of the events leading up
to the death of Christ. A person who walked into the movie not knowing much about the
life of Christ would have been lost at times and would have missed why the suffering was
so important. As a tool to convert non-Christians, the film falls short. As a way to
remind the faithful what it took to bring them salvation, Passion hits a
homerun.
I’m glad (in a strange way) that I went to see the film, but it’s
not one I’ll be buying on DVD to show the kids each Easter.
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