Violence in 'Passion of the Christ' relentless
By Mary Kaye Ritz
Advertiser Religion & Ethics Writer
About nine minutes into Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," the first bone-crunching blow is thrown.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
Viewers should be braced for the next two hours, which are filled with a depiction of agony and relentless violence that is being alternately heralded for authenticity and reviled for its graphic nature.
Moviegoers await an advance screening of Mel Gibson's controversial "The Passion of the Christ" at Ward Theatres.
The film opens nationwide tomorrow. Advance screenings today are sold out to hundreds of Christian ticketholders, and blocks of tickets to this week's shows have been sold in advance to Honolulu's evangelical churches. While early controversy over the film focused on accusations of anti-Semitism, the film's copious blood-letting might just overshadow those concerns.
Some members of the Jewish faith had criticized the film as anti-Semitic based on early versions of the script, which they charged reinforced an image of Jews as those who demanded the death of Jesus. The charges of anti-Semitism caused Gibson to edit a contentious line — "His blood be on us and on our children," spoken by a Jewish high priest in Aramaic. The line, Gibson said in a televised interview, remains in the story, but is not translated in a subtitle.
Before the film opened, members of the Chabad of Hawaii temple had been talking about the film, said Rabbi Itchel Krasnjansky. But they were waiting until it screened to form an opinion.
At a critic's screening yesterday, the movie, performed entirely in Aramaic and Latin, was shown in its scored, subtitled, final version. And bloody it is.
A scourging scene, with flesh-ripping implements, lasts 18 minutes. When the crown of thorns is pressed into Jesus' head, blood runs into his eyes.
At an early screening at Ward Theatres yesterday, people stayed through the credits at the end of the film, sniffling and wiping their eyes. The crowd broke into applause as the last credits rolled.
Erik Johnson, 21, said he found the movie "very moving and refreshing — a good reminder of why I am a Christian."
Jay and Dee Williams said they found the portrayal to be realistic. "It's the truth," said Dee.
Said Jay: "They're lucky they didn't see the real thing."
National critics found the film's graphic violence daunting:
"Relentlessly savage, 'The Passion' plays like the Gospel according to the Marquis de Sade," wrote Newsweek's David Ansen.
The New Yorker's David Denby called it "one of the cruelest movies in the history of cinema."
Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote: "Many Christians — who would appreciate the message — may be repelled by the film's unrelenting bloodletting."
But there are those who say the violence is necessary to show the extent of Jesus' suffering.
"One pastor counted the number of strokes and said, 'That wasn't the historical 30 lashes,' " said Pam Chun, co-founder and vice president of Hawaiian Islands Ministries, who watched the movie in its rough-cut screening in December and is seeing it again tonight. "It is a violent movie, but to get across to our culture which is so anaesthetized to violence, (Gibson) had to go beyond to make the point about how brutal it was."
Reach Mary Kaye Ritz at mritz@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8035.
