Thanks to the works of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorcese, we’ve become accustomed to movies that present bloody spectacle as an end in itself. (Think of the protracted torture and murder sequences in Kill Bill Vol. I, Reservoir Dogs, and Goodfellas, for instance.) What we don’t really expect is that films created to inspire religious devotion would succumb to this contemporary temptation. But that’s the charge many are making against The Passion of The Christ. It’s coming from the Church’s enemies (Christopher Hitchens) but also from her friends (Franco Zeffirelli), and from secular critics who don’t seem to care one way or the other. Looking over this film and comparing it to the others Gibson has directed, and the roles he has consistently chosen, some commentators have decided that Gibson has a “thing” for brutality—and that it seems to have distorted his presentation of Jesus’ death. I hate to say it, but I think they may be right.

In deciding to make The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson wittingly or not took on an enormous challenge: How could he show his audience the profundity of the suffering of Christ, a suffering which he bore in the depths of his heart—from his rejection and condemnation by Israel's children to his abandonment by the Father and descent into Hell? A difficult and delicate problem—which Gibson solved by portraying Christ’s profound spiritual anguish in terms of incredible physical agony.

The Passion is filling a gap in the religious imagination of most Americans, whose Christian churches have long downplayed the brutal facts of Jesus’ sacrifice.

As a student of filmmaking, I think I understand why this happened. After all, you can’t photograph a person’s spirit—only his flesh. But a skilled director such as Gibson has a hundred ways to convey what’s going on inside a character—his use of actors’ facial expressions, his shaping of their delivery and their gestures, his use of the musical score, his direction of the cinematography. Directors who make subtle use of these techniques can reveal for us the interior life of their characters.

I wish I could say that this is true of Gibson’s Passion. Despite its explicitness—indeed, because of its explicitness—the film gives us virtually no insight into the interiority of the person of Christ. And that’s what we’re looking for—it’s the main event, the whole point not just of the Passion, but of the Incarnation, of Christianity.

To be fair, this film’s explicit and intense violence has been one of the reasons for its enormous success—and not because it’s drawing the sorts of crowds that flocked to see Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No, the film is filling a real gap in the religious imagination of most Americans, whose Christian churches have long downplayed the brutal facts of Jesus’ sacrifice.

And then there are the thousands of curious filmgoers who have been reared on the extreme cinematic violence of Tarantino, Scorcese, and even Gibson himself. I suspect that they’re drawn to such dramatic violence because they feel these movies are on to something. They sense, perhaps unconsciously, that there is a certain violence underlying the surface of reality itself, namely the struggle between death and life—a conflict in which the enemy is fierce, and from which no one is safe.

Unfortunately, appealing to such peoples’ sensibilities results here in a picture of Jesus’ suffering which is almost unbelievable. The protracted flogging sequence in this film is so brutal it’s nearly impossible to believe Jesus wouldn’t have died before he ever got to Golgotha. His latex flesh is torn to ribbons. He loses what appears to be the equivalent of three men’s blood.  And as almost everyone knows by now, not only is Gibson's Jesus scourged across the back, but when he's done on that side he's turned over and the scourging continues, now with whips equipped with hooked pieces of metal large enough to cut great swaths through a man’s flesh.

In the light of Passion’s unrelenting carnage, it seems the film’s lead quotation from Isaiah was chosen with an eye towards silencing the squeamish: Gibson is saying to his audience, “It’s only by his stripes that we’re healed, folks, so don’t be scandalized if he gets one for every sin.”

Filmgoers sense that there is violence underlying the surface of reality itself, namely the struggle between death and life.

All this physical wrack and ruin, rather than piercing us with the sadness of Christ, instead merely makes us wince and cringe and hope to God it will all stop as soon as possible—not because our heart is breaking along with Christ’s, but because it’s all just too awful. It’s something like the difference between suffering with the victim and suffering because of the victim—the difference between com-passion and moral horror, between love and shock. In short, it seems Gibson’s Passion is a case of aiming for the heart and hitting the gut.

But why? Why does Gibson miss the mark? Why has he not broken our hearts, but simply turned our stomachs? Ironically, it’s precisely because his Jesus is so utterly crushed, so entirely overwhelmed by his torments, as he quivers, writhes, shudders, moans, and rolls back his eyes all the way to Calvary. In short, Gibson causes this man to be so swallowed up by his stripes that the person of Jesus disappears. So rather than causing us to grieve over the tragedy of a God whose heart breaks for and is broken by those whom He loves, the film merely oppresses us with the image of a poor young man who is being slowly reduced to a bloody pulp. Yes, a viewer could see in the suffering of Gibson’s Jesus the tragedy of our rejection of the one who loves us beyond all understanding—but if he does, it is because of what he supplies from his own faith, not because of what he is shown by the filmmaker.

The warmly-lit scenes from the Last Supper and the luminously-lit scenes from the Sermon on the Mount do give us a glimpse of Jesus’ tender love for his disciples and even for his enemies. But on the Via Crucis all of that disappears. The harsh contrast between the feel-good flashbacks and the real-time crushing of Christ almost makes the pre-crushed Christ look sentimental and naïve—unsuspecting of what lies in store for him. Perhaps Gibson could have avoided this discontinuity between his two portraits of Jesus by showing us that there’s something about the suffering Jesus that remains uncrushed even as he’s being crushed.

The film gives us virtually no insight into the interior life of the person of Christ.

Would this have been possible? It was for C.S. Lewis—and he was writing for children. In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe he presents a silenced, shorn, yet still majestic Aslan, even as he is stretched out on the Stone Table to be slain. Gibson’s Jesus, on the other hand, seems crushed right down to the bone, his Sacred Heart reduced to quivering jelly. In the midst of his complete disintegration, even Jesus’ prophetic words of reassurance to his mother on the path to Golgotha ("See, I make all things new") might be mistaken for a mere show of courage for Mom's sake. And his final prayer, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” seem like words that don't fit the music; it's hard to believe that a man so utterly reduced would be capable of largess.

For me, the clearest indication that Gibson's portrayal of Christ's suffering was a failure was that, while I wept not once for Christ, I wept more than once for Mary. You could see her heart being pierced, and could suffer along with her. As a cinematic Pietà, Passion succeeds brilliantly. But the person of Jesus is so obscured by his physical obliteration that we're left to wonder: could he have any heart left to love with—any heart left to be broken by us, for us? You simply can’t tell here. And yet it is that suffering—the suffering of rejection, of abandonment, of losing Heaven and being lost in Hell, far more than the suffering caused by his wounds—which is at the heart of the Passion of Christ. 

Returning to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe—here again Lewis achieves what Gibson could not, illuminating the mystery lying at the very center of the Passion drama: the despair of Christ. Lewis has the diabolical White Witch taunt Aslan: “When you are dead, what is to prevent me from claiming not only the whole of Narnia, but the life of the traitor as well? You have lost your own life, and you have not saved his. In that knowledge, despair, and die.”

None of us can imagine what it would be like to be God abandoned by God—but any of us can imagine what it would be like to feel that we may have given everything for nothing. In this way, then, Lewis reveals to us the broken heart of Christ. But all Gibson shows us is his broken body. If in so doing he meant to show us the mortifications of Christ’s Sacred Heart, the effort was ham-handed by comparison, and the result sensationalistic and mediocre.

In this film, Christ’s love is not revealed by his wounds; it is submerged beneath them.

Some have charged that Gibson, in making his Passion just as hyperbolically violent as many of his other movies (Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, Payback, Braveheart, The Patriot), was pandering to the masses for the sake of fat box-office returns. But I believe Gibson made his movie so violent not out of crass commercialism, but out of conviction; I believe Gibson’s world is, to its very core, a world of bad guys vs. good guys (or one good guy), a world of black vs. white, of Hell vs. Heaven duking it out, no holds barred, until the bitter, bloody end.

But the world is more complicated than that. This is a world where the good people do bad things, and the bad people, whether they know it or not, want to be good. It’s a world where the wheat and the chaff will not be separated until the last day—precisely because, until then, we all of us are both wheat and chaff.

To his credit, Gibson does not depict Christ as mowing down the servants of Hell—e.g., centurions, Sadducees, Pharisees, thieves, traitors or demons in black hooded cloaks; his Jesus is a grape crushed beneath their feet. But at the same time Gibson always makes sure by the end that the bad guys get what’s coming to them, that the right asses get kicked (if not sent straight to Hell), either by demon-children, storms, earthquakes or eye-pecking crows. (We even get an image that represents the casting of Christ’s defeated demonic tormentor back into Hell, complete with the obligatory “NOOOOOoooooo!!!!”)

What’s missing from this picture? Quite simply, love—the very love that Gibson briefly shows Jesus preaching in happier times, namely love of enemies, love of sinners—the love Christ in truth had for the very people who were killing him. In this film, that love is not revealed by Gibson’s Jesus’ wounds; it is submerged beneath them.

Gibson has spoken movingly about his profound conversion, his rediscovery of his childhood Catholic faith—which motivated him to make this film. That helps explain its shortcomings; anyone who has only recently come to know the difference between good and evil is prone to mixing up the sin with the sinner—and damning both of them. He’s probably also tempted to demand that he see the kingdom of God, the justice of God, realized here and now. We have to fight both temptations—and then only with the patience of God Himself.