Tablet review of The Passion of the Christ

Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this link from The Tablet from the principal of Heythrop College in London (where, once upon a time, I was a tutorial assistant):

A remarkable Passion
John McDade
Mel Gibson has made a stunning and justifiably violent account of a Christ who bears the weight of the world's sin. But, says our critic, his film is not anti-Semitic

An excerpt:

When Christ rises from his prayer in the Garden, he crushes under his heel the snake which has crept from the devil's bosom - in iconography it is Mary who crushes the head of the serpent, and this sends us back to the conflict between the serpent and Eve's offspring in Genesis 3:15. When Christ dies, there is a remarkable shot (a God's-eye perspective?) in which Golgotha, seen from above, is like a globe of the world from which the figures of Satan and his brood are summarily eliminated. The devil (and certainly not the Jewish people) is the real antagonist of Christ; one of the film's structural features is the polarity between Satan and Mary, eyeing each other on the road to Golgotha. "See, mother," Christ tells her as he falls a second time, "I make all things new" - a remarkable line from Revelation 21:5. Satan mimics Mary's motherhood by cradling a devil-child in her bosom (a child who drives Judas to kill himself for his suicide on the tree is the devil's counterpoint to Christ's tree of life), while at the end of the film, Mary holds her dead Son in her lap in a Caravaggio-style pietà, looking outwards towards the viewer - the one point in the film which explicitly engages the viewer in the drama.

In one of the most moving sequences, drawn from the writings of Sr Catherine Emmerich, an eighteenth-century German visionary, the Blessed Virgin and Mary Magdalene are given towels by Pilate's wife which they then use to soak up the blood from the scourging at the pillar. Gibson uses this action to give a flashback to Magdalene's rescue by Jesus from the Pharisees' stones: she is identified as the woman caught in adultery. The sequence of the scourging - lasting for 20 minutes or so - is dramatically the high point of the film. After the first series of beatings, Christ, already brutally scarred, raises himself up from the stones and prepares to take more: this is the Son of God carrying through his divine work. When, finally, the Cross is about to be lifted up and set in the hole prepared for it, we are shown in flashback Christ raising the bread at the Last Supper - "This is my body for the life of the world" - and then the Cross is dropped into place. The Eucharistic Body, the Sin-bearing Body and - right at the end, in a brief, silent, enigmatic sequence - the Risen Body, are the single locus of salvation. Gibson gives us profound themes from orthodox Christian faith in a popular medium; that, in itself, is remarkable . . . . .

. . . . . Gibson has not given us a film that manipulates its audience, and certainly not one which provokes Christians to anti-Jewish sentiments. He does not incite the viewer to view Jews negatively, nor - although violence is pervasive - does he elicit any vicarious thrill at what takes place. Nor does he encourage hatred of any person or group in the film. This film is not in the tradition of Passion Plays. Christ's forgiveness of all, spoken from the Cross, is dramatically serious and guides the viewer about how to think and feel. Contrast this with real cinematic manipulation of hatred and violence . . . . .

I disagree about Emmerich's vision of the mopping up of the blood as "one of the most moving sequences"; I wasn't quite sure what the purpose was of them cleaning up after Jesus. But otherwise, an interesting review.