The next text on the list, curiously enough, concerns the death of Jesus. In 1963, Manoel de Oliveira brought out his Acto da Primavera: a picture that faithfully and patiently records a passion play done in rural Portugal. The trick here is that Oliveira for the most part does not present Acto da Primavera as a documentary. Instead, after providing a brief frame, he lets the story take over, so that you soon feel you're watching a fiction film, performed by stiff but fascinatingly unselfconscious actors.

Then in 1978, in what was arguably his greatest achievement, this same Oliveira did for the classic Portuguese novel Amor de Perdição (Doomed Love) what Stroheim was only said to have done for McTeague. Over the course of a four-and-a-half-hour film, Oliveira has his performers act out the entire text--an exercise that sometimes requires them to pause in their tracks, while a voiceover narrator catches up with a lengthy patch of narration.

What do we learn from this brief history? That textual literalism in film has primarily been a matter of false claims, misdirection, illusionism and irony. Mel Gibson distinguishes himself in this tradition in two ways. First, he's dead serious, as if textual literalism could in fact be achieved. Second, he bases his work not on a novel or even a passion play but on a text that he takes to be inerrant--and by this move he doubles the stakes.

This doubling is what most troubles me. Yes, I'm also troubled by the encouragement that The Passion of the Christ may give to Jew-haters. A worry isn't necessarily baseless, just because the preposterous Abe Foxman voices it. (Nor is every reassurance to be swallowed, just because it comes from as smooth an actor as Mel Gibson. It's unthinkable that he would be an anti-Semite, Gibson explained on TV to Diane Sawyer; to be anti-Semitic would be un-Christian. To which I counterpose this statement by Godfrey de Bouillon, recorded after his Crusaders had slaughtered the entire population of Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter in July 1099: "And then, when we thought that the Savior had been sufficiently revenged by the death of the Jews and other infidels, we went with tears to worship at the Holy Sepulcher." The teachings that inspired de Bouillon were repudiated by the Vatican when I was just entering high school.) But, beyond my parochial squeamishness over this movie, I'm concerned at how Gibson forecloses any interpretation. "It is as it was." Disagree with the film in any way--even to point out how the Gospels are at variance with history--and you disagree with revealed truth.

However much you might play at seeing his work as just another movie, Gibson has gone outside the normal bounds of show business and into the territory of America's religious absolutists: John Ashcroft having himself anointed with oil, gay-hating lawmakers attempting to write Leviticus into the Constitution, antiabortionists shooting to kill, generals declaring holy war against the Muslim infidel. Our country has a great, great many such people who do not consider their convictions to be open to discussion. They maintain a significant hold on political power; and since a lot of them have an antinomian streak, I doubt the rule of law would stand in their way, should we manage to loosen their grip. The ever-boyish and ingenuous Gibson, with his simple faith, has made The Passion of the Christ as a gift for these people.

Thumbs down.

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