20 Years With ‘The Passion of the Christ’
A call came to my home one night in late June 2003: “Do you want to see The Passion?” Of course, I did. Everybody in Christendom did.
Already that summer, opposing voices in the Catholic Church, in Hollywood and in the media were hotly debating a project that practically nobody had seen. Rumor was the film was all in biblical languages without any subtitles.
Rumor was the movie was a bloody spectacle based on the visions of some obscure Catholic mystic. Rumor was Mel Gibson had bankrolled the entire project to the tune of $25 million. Rumor was the movie was overtly anti-Semitic. The film wouldn’t be released to the public for eight more months, but the rumors had already made The Passion of the Christ the biggest cultural Sign of Contradiction in generations.
Looking back now, it’s hard to believe how the political fuss pretty much overwhelmed any discussion of the artistic merits of the movie. No one could have fathomed in that moment that Gibson would be the first victim of the cancel impulse, as his stunning and very personal movie about Jesus arguably destroyed his career, even as it made him the wealthiest man in Hollywood.
Twenty years on, with all the culture-war dust settled, a clear-eyed consideration of The Passion of the Christ is that the film is indisputably the greatest work of sacred cinema ever made.
Back in 2003, I was not ready for The Passion of the Christ as a work of sacred cinema. It was worlds away from any biblical movie that we had ever seen. Unlike most prior biblical films, it wasn’t hokey, affected or surreal.
But I was also not ready for the theological vision of Christ’s suffering and death that spooled out on the small screen over Gibson ’s desk that June afternoon. No one was ready for The Passion — neither in the Church, nor in Hollywood, and certainly not in the community of film critics. Rotten Tomatoes, the aggregate movie-review site, has the top critics on record as giving the film a “Rotten” rating of 40%. That’s even lower than Tim Burton’s creepy failure Alice in Wonderland (51%) and Man of Steel, the lamest comic-book movie ever made (56%).
Probably because of the politics, the critics couldn’t really see The Passion in 2003. Today, all but the most anti-Christian critics would have to begrudgingly admit that the film has stood the test of time. What I wrote in a review the day after I saw the rough cut is established consensus today: “The Passion is a miracle.”
In terms of movies dealing with the sacred, The Passion of the Christ raised the bar almost too high. While the film should have become a new standard for faith-based films, it seems to have been too brilliant and ended up paralyzing religious filmmakers instead of becoming their template.
