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" PLUS: The 31 Faces of Jesus We Know Today It&amp;#039;s hard to imagine, but ten years ago, when Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ, he was a widely respected film star with a stable marriage and one of the most bankable names in Hollywood. His life and his career now lie in ruins, blown up by an anti-Semitic rant to police while driving drunk, a Holocaust-denying but interview-giving father (the worst kind of dad), and this phone call. But before all that off-the-charts self-immolation, before he sought out and earned the contempt of nearly the entire world, Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ and the world loved him for it. Gibson received praise for his film from John Paul II, and The Passion of the Christ, depressingly, remains the highest grossing non-English language film in history. Now that the controversies surrounding it have died down and it stands simply as a work of art, we can examine it, as it were, with fresh eyes. It looks worse than ever.  Many doubted the anti-Semitism in the film when it first came out. I don&amp;#039;t really see how. The Jewish stereotypes appear early and often. The Passion of the Christ is not based entirely on the gospels but also on the visions and writings of nineteenth-century German nun Anne Catherine Emmerich. She was, perhaps, no more remarkably anti-Semitic than the average nineteenth-century German nun, but then again that turns out to be quite anti-Semitic enough. She believed that Jews used the blood of children in their profane rites, for example. In the wake of the mass popularity of The Passion of the Christ, the Catholic Church showed its typical good taste and beatified her. The anti-Semitism, though extensive and prevalent, is pretty mild. The Pharisees look like a cross between an illustration in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Israeli cabinet, and the film really, really makes clear that the Jews, more than the Romans, are responsible for the death of Christ, but there&amp;#039;s no suggestion, as Gibson claimed to the Malibu police, that the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. The violence, too, remains shocking. But ten years on it&amp;#039;s more hilarious than it is shocking. The scene in which Jesus is flayed is so over-the-top, so crazily pornographic, it makes a Michael Bay film look like an understated reenactment of Uncle Vanya. (You can watch the crucifixion sequence here, though a warning: It&amp;#039;s still hard to stomach.) It does go on, too. I remember being struck by the pool of blood in that scene, the flesh torn to tatters, when I first saw the film. Upon re-watching it, I was struck by just how boring all the horror was. The claim at the time was that Gibson was fusing Hollywood with the gospels, and that the violence was Hollywood. If only. Hollywood violence has tension. It starts somewhere and it leads somewhere else. The violence in The Passion of the Christ is the same thing over and over again, undistinguished and empty. It&amp;#039;s gratuitous, sure, but no fun.  But the real problem with The Passion of the Christ is that it&amp;#039;s not engaging. It&amp;#039;s a terrible story, missing a true antagonist or sense of human stakes. Once you tear back the controversies, there&amp;#039;s not much to see. The Passion, as it is found in the gospels, is one of the world&amp;#039;s great stories. It is full of fantastic tensions, moments of gripping narrative, wonderfully rich characters, and flat-out great lines. Let&amp;#039;s face it: It&amp;#039;s a barnburner. Gibson takes all of that marvelous complexity and reduces it to the inspection of a single figure undergoing a single action: Christ being torn to shreds. The movie is gauzy and vague: There is a good guy, Jeshua, but there are so many bad guys \u2014 Jews, Romans, the devil, Peter, Judas \u2014 that they all sort of blend into each other. After the first beating, Jesus&amp;#039;s face is little more than a mass of bruises, which makes it impossible to register any emotions in his suffering. It&amp;#039;s all just suffering. The use of the original languages \u2014 Aramaic and Latin \u2014 also acts as an impenetrable barrier. You can tell that none of the actors spoke these languages originally. Their emotions are caged. The language sounds, for lack of a better world, dead. In short, The Passion of the Christ is like one of those Catholic scenes of the Last Supper you find in a religious goods store, sprung to life. This was no doubt the purpose. There are many terrible movies in this world, but none that I know of which are so well made. If you look at a film like 2003&amp;#039;s The Room, widely considered the worst, it&amp;#039;s a mass of failures. Continuity errors, lame dialogue, and so on. But The Passion of the Christ is in a way a much worse film than that disaster, exactly because it is, by its own terms, a success. Each of its articulate scenes only makes it less interesting, less human, less believable, because the creator doesn&amp;#039;t want to be interesting or human or believable. That is what makes it practically unique as a film, a rare monster: the perfectly made, truly terrible film. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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