The hour is early morning; an otherworldly blue haze swirls over the Garden of Gethsemane. Off in a quiet corner, an anguished man kneels in prayer, his brow and tousled hair dripping with sweat, as he quietly struggles to put to rest some inner dilemma.
In this opening scene of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," the anguished man alone in the garden is, of course, Jesus Christ moments before his arrest.
Yet what is most striking about this opening scene is precisely how human this Jesus is, how ordinary he seems as he prepares to meet his crucifixion.
Indeed, throughout the movie, Gibson's Jesus remains, above all, human -- and it is in so humanizing Jesus that the film is at its most powerful.
All of the dialogue is in Aramaic, Latin or Hebrew, seemingly to prevent translation from creating yet another degree of separation between the viewer and the human Jesus.
In flashbacks throughout the film, we see non-Biblically based flashbacks of Jesus' childhood again seemingly calculated to humanize him. The audience sees Jesus as an infant in Mary's arms. Later on in another flashback the audience Jesus as a teenager laughingly splashing water on his mother. These are sights common to most childhoods, even today.
The depictions of the great moments of Jesus' preaching, including a very understated Sermon on the Mount scene, likewise avoid shrouding Jesus in superhuman glory. There is a similar rationale in Gibson's choice to avoid a glorious Resurrection scene.
And yes, within this context, even the movie's much-decried violence only underscores how a very human Jesus must have suffered under physical torture.
"The Passion" is certainly not for the squeamish: The audience collectively cringes at the sight of a drooping, bleeding Jesus stoically enduring flogging after flogging. But the movie is no more graphic than any number of recent films.
Furthermore, each time Jesus' tortures began again, I found myself comparing the image on screen before me with more familiar images of Jesus, wondering where I might "fit" each new incident of brutality into my understanding of the story.
Comparing Gibson's bleeding Jesus to any familiar images, there is something in this Jesus -- something in his raw humanity and raw suffering -- that one can't get from any of these prior images.
There is undoubtedly a new dimension "The Passion of the Christ" adds to the collective piecemeal cultural portrait of Jesus.
So all the above reflects on the film, but what about the virulent anti-Semitism to which so many critics have objected?
I detected very little, but there are a few instances in which Gibson uses artistic license to portray the Jews in a more unfavorable light or the Romans in a more flattering light than the Gospels suggest.
For example, a crowd of Jews assembles to taunt Jesus during his initial appearance before the high priests, although no such masses of demonstrators is mentioned in any of the Gospels.
Along the same lines, it is true that Pontius Pilate and his wife come across far more favorably in the film than they do anywhere according to the Gospels.
While Pilate is perhaps most famous -- or infamous-- for callously washing his hands and thus declaring himself not responsibility for the death of Christ, this incident is not highlighted in the movie.
Instead, viewers see a Pilate distinctly sympathetic to Jesus, who invites him inside away from the angry crowds, offers him a glass of water, and engages him in philosophical conversation.
Gibson's depiction of this encounter is clearly based on the Gospel of John, as none of the others mention such a conversation.
Pilate's offering Jesus water at this point further embellishes on even this sympathetic account.
In the case of Pilate's wife, she is only mentioned in the Gospels briefly -- yet in Gibson's film, she has a lengthy conversation with her husband begging him not to be harsh on Jesus and even offers a weeping Virgin Mary her own handkerchief.
Even these departures from the Bible, though, hardly substantiate the kind of accusations that have been leveled at the movie like Jami Bernard's statement in the New York Daily News that "this is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II."
Nor should one forget that the Romans receive plenty of blame here-- Roman soldiers are responsible for inflicting some of the worst physical tortures shown in the film.
On balance, then, yes, caveats, distortions of the Gospels and all, "The Passion" is worth seeing, and because of its emphasis on the humanity of the Passion, worth seeing for people of a range of religious beliefs.
