The Passion of the Christ is an intensely brutal movie, whose spiritual center is located firmly behind the camera. As director and co-screenwriter, Mel Gibson is all but ecstatic before the agonies he has so painstakingly staged, and with which he so completely identifies. His surges of emotion carry you through the picture--which puts the purported central character at a disadvantage.

James Caviezel, who plays Jesus, brings to the part an El Grecoish face and mournful demeanor that have served him well in somewhat similar roles: the saintly GI in The Thin Red Line, the buried and resurrected hero of The Count of Monte Cristo, the participant in a miraculous (if not altogether spooky) father-and-son relationship in Frequency. So lean that he looks tortured from the outset, as if his muscles couldn't quite stretch from one end of his long bones to the other, Caviezel takes naturally to the athletic round of sufferings imposed on him in The Passion; and yet his inherent otherworldliness, which you might have thought would infuse the creatural side of his Jesus with a suggestion of the divine, makes him opaque as an actor. Good film actors (such as Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ, or for that matter Maia Morgenstern, who plays Mary in The Passion) have a knack for pulling in your attention and then directing it elsewhere, into the cinematic world around them. Caviezel, though, is always an object for the camera to study, never a consciousness that opens up its own viewpoint within the screen. (You might say the same for the beautiful yet perpetually blocklike Monica Bellucci, who is the film's Magdalene.) The casting of Caviezel is the telltale problem of The Passion; it betrays Gibson's desire as author, perpetrator, rapt witness and vicarious Christ to see for a Jesus he has himself made blind, to think for a Christ he's made thoughtless.

The decision to have the actors mouth Aramaic and Latin only worsens the problem. Although some viewers will be able to follow the dialogue unassisted (I know a handful of such people, all of whom teach at the Jewish Theological Seminary), the great majority of us will need to read the subtitles, so that our eyes must focus not on Caviezel's face but on the blocks of letters at the bottom of the screen. In this way, too, Gibson diminishes the performances while magnifying the importance of the text. Toward what end, I wonder?

In one sense, he is merely the latest in an odd but influential line of filmmakers who have aspired to make literal transcriptions of a text, or at least are said to have done so. The earliest was Erich von Stroheim, whose Greed (1924) became legendary as an exhaustive, paragraph-by-paragraph realization of Frank Norris's novel McTeague. The legend is nonsense, of course, as the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has demonstrated; but it's persistent nonsense, which helped establish Stroheim's reputation as an artist implacably at odds with venal Hollywood.

Next in line comes a great Catholic filmmaker, Robert Bresson, whose version of Bernanos's novel Journal d'un curé de campagne is central to one of the most important polemics in film history: François Truffaut's 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français," the founding document of auteurism. In an astonishingly slippery maneuver, Truffaut used the alleged faithfulness of Bresson's film (faithfulness to the spirit, not the letter) in order to deride a competing adaptation by the screenwriters Aurenche and Bost. Truffaut sank these old-guard figures by exposing the liberties they had taken with the Bernanos text, and did so with such vehemence that you might have thought their unrealized project had actually been filmed. Talk about judging a movie by its screenplay!

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