NEW YORK — Film director
Mel Gibson’s cinematic depiction of the last hours of Jesus
has been unveiled in the United States to long lines of movie
goers, protests and mixed critical reviews, some of them scathing.
“The Passion of the Christ” — a film some
religious leaders have suggested is anti-Semitic for its depiction
of Jews — opened on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 25), breaking records
for a film with a religious theme.
“Playing on 4,643 screens at 3,006 theatres, the $30 million
production took in a whopping $26,556,573 on Wednesday —
ironically prompting most in the industry to use the Lord’s
name in vain out of sheer amazement,” the movie tracking
service Box Office Mojo said.
The film also faced demonstrations and controversy. Organized
protests greeted the film from coast to coast, including a group
of Jewish protesters who picketed a New York City movie theater
while wearing uniforms similar to those of Jewish prisoners of
Second World War concentration camps.
After the film’s release, a Pentecostal church in Denver
displayed a sign — eventually removed after a protest —
declaring “Jews Killed the Lord Jesus.” The sign was
immediately condemned by Jewish leaders and by officials of the
Colorado Council of Churches, Colorado’s largest ecumenical
agency. The church’s denomination also apologized for the
sign.
“I would hope that they would hear the outcry not just
of the Jewish community, but of the Christian community as well,
that this is not a true representation of the gospel of love and
grace of Jesus Christ,” said James Ryan, head of the Colorado
Council of Churches, quoted by The Associated Press news agency.
A woman in Wichita, KS, died while watching the highly violent
film, apparently of a heart attack.
Gibson said on the NBC television network’s “The
Tonight Show” that his film had been unfairly prejudged
for a year before its release, but he said he forgave his critics
and he would try to adopt a loving attitude “even for those
who persecute you.” He noted, “For a year, it’s
been nothing but nasty editorials and name-calling.”
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, viewed
by some as the most prominent film critic in the United States,
said “The Passion” was the most violent film he had
ever seen but he underlined Gibson’s “single-minded
urgency.” He wrote: “I can respond to the power of
belief whether I agree or not, and when I find it in a film, I
must respect it.”
Critic Phil Kloer, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
acknowledged there had been “massive hype,” but said:
“This is a movie so singular, so intense, so overwhelming
that it simply has to be experienced.”
However, several New York critics lambasted the film. A. O.
Scott of The New York Times wrote: “‘The Passion
of the Christ’ is so relentlessly focused on the savagery
of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less
from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the
spirit than in uplifting it.”
The New Yorker magazine’s critic David Denby said
that Gibson showed “little interest in celebrating the electric
charge of hope and redemption that Jesus Christ brought into the
world.” Gibson, Denby wrote, “is so thoroughly fixated
on the scourging and crushing of Christ, and so meagerly involved
in the spiritual meanings of the final hours, that he falls in
danger of altering Jesus’ message of love into one of hate.”
John W. Marshall, an academic in religion studies at the University
of Toronto, wrote in the Toronto Star: “The movie mixes
in so much medievalism, and so little historical consciousness
(the director has spent his historical attention on Roman instruments
of torture rather than on ideology), that it fails to make the
complex translation that must accompany a retelling of the gospel
stories in the world after the Holocaust.”
But Chris Weinkopf, the editorial page editor of the Daily
News of Los Angeles, accused some of the critics who had accused
the film as bigotry of indulging in the same thing.
“As a production, ‘The Passion’ is an artistic
masterpiece,” said Weinkopf. “It conveys with beauty
and agony one of Christianity’s greatest paradoxes —
that an event so excruciating, so cruel and so wrong could ultimately
be so liberating, so generous, so right.
“In an age when deriding faith passes for intellectual
sophistication, where truth is considered relative and the very
notion of sin is dismissed, the film offers an honest, unapologetic
portrayal of Christianity — ‘The Passion of the Christ’
tramples on all the rules and hypocrisies of political correctness.
It says there is a God, and it names him. And that, for militant
secularists, amounts to just plain poor taste.”
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