A Narrow Vision and Staggering Violence

Combining the built-in audience of the Bible, the incendiary potential of "The Birth of a Nation" and the marketing genius of "The Blair Witch Project," the arrival of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" feels like a milestone in modern culture. It's a nexus of religion, celebrity, cinema and mass communication that tells us more about the way our world works than we may want to know.

The film left me in the grip of a profound despair, and not for reasons I would have thought. It wasn't simply because of "The Passion's" overwhelming level of on-screen violence, a litany of tortures ending in a beyond-graphic crucifixion.

And it wasn't because of the treatment of the high priest Caiphas and the Hebrew power elite of Jesus' time -- a disturbing portrait likely to give, I feel sure unintentionally, comfort to anti-Semites with its Gospels-based portrayal of the Jews as the sine qua non of Jesus' arrest and execution.

Instead, what is profoundly disheartening is that people of goodwill will see this film in completely different ways. Where I see almost sadistic violence, they will see transcendence; where I see blame, they will see truth.

In effect, aspects of Gibson's creative makeup -- his career-long interest in martyrdom and the yearning for dramatic conflict that make him an excellent actor, coupled with his belief in the Gospels' literal truth -- have sideswiped "The Passion." What is left is a film so narrowly focused as to be inaccessible for all but the devout.

Those factors have made this a film that will separate people rather than bring them together. Normally these kinds of disagreements don't matter, but the "You just don't get it" confrontations here have sad echoes of savage conflicts that have lasted for centuries. It has the potential to foster divisiveness because of the way it exposes and accentuates the fissures in belief that otherwise might go unnoticed. We all know where the road paved with good intentions leads, and it is not to the gates of heaven.

The film, in Aramaic and Latin, has some 4,000 prints headed for theaters for an Ash Wednesday official opening that starts at midnight tonight. That's an unheard-of situation for an unapologetically religious film in a defiantly secular, not to say sinful, time.