Despite my misgivings we went to see the Passion movie yesterday. It was not at all the movie I was expecting. From the opening scene it seemed both surreal and mythic. It did not so much tell a story as it put together images that you recognized from film and art and from hearing and reading about it a thousand times. If a viewer did not already know the story the film might not even have made sense. There was never any explanation of how Jesus came to be where he was. But we all do know the story so it didn�t have to be told. It is one of the central myths of our culture.

Partly because of the subtitles I suppose it reminded me of a silent movie. Often the actors seemed to be posing in familiar tableaux like you would see in a wax museum. It really conveyed a mood of an ancient and familiar story being retold.

Strangely the violence did not bother me all that much. It was so extreme that it no longer seemed real. In fact I felt oddly detached and unmoved by the whole film. Not everyone in the audience felt that way however. I heard more than a few people in the audience sobbing or gasping.

I came to the conclusion that it was less anti-semitic than I had expected but more so than it could have been. The story from the first telling was anti-semitic. The early Christians tried to ally themselves with the authorities by portraying the Jews as a common enemy. Because of that it is necessary to bend over backwards to remove that taint from the myth. Gibson actually does insert several extra-biblical scenes in the film that help with this. There are scenes of Jews speaking up for Jesus, offering him water, and so on. But then he portrays the Jewish authorities as practically rabid. I wish there had been more explanation for their behavior.

The characters that most of the audience are likely to identify with are Pilate and his wife, who come across as educated, upper-class liberals. The Romans in their day occupied a similar position in their world as Americans do in our own time. I could easily picture Pilate as the American governor of an occupied country, weighing the life of one man against his own goals. And in another added scene Mrs Pilate offers clean towels to Mary. They seemed just like the father and mother on Joan of Arcadia, one of the TV sitcoms I watch.

One of the best parts of the film is the portrayal of Mary, always in the crowd and following Jesus as he carried the cross. I particularly liked the flashbacks with her in them, one where she runs to catch the falling baby Jesus and another where she is laughing with the carpenter Jesus. Juxtaposed against her in the crowd was Satan which provided an element of good versus evil.