MetaCatholic

It’s difficult to review something when you’ve only seen a third of it, so these can be no more than a few preliminary comments on The Passion, whose first episode aired tonight. (Well, technically, last night now). I must confess to finding it something of a mixed bag.

Things I liked included

• the sense of bustle, dirt and crowding around Jerusalem
• the actual portrayal of slaughter and blood being cleaned up (admittedly on a small scale) bringing home something of the reality of temple sacrifices
• the grounding in the political relationships of Roman Judaea
• the way in which Jesus was often lost in the crowd: plenty of things went on that disregarded his presence
• the confusion and mixed attitudes of the disciples
• the adherence to Mark’s account for the “cleansing of the temple” on the day following the entry to Jerusalem, resisting the dramatic temptation to which Matthew and Luke, together, I think, with every previous Jesus film, succumbed
• the grounding of Pilate and Caiaphas in relationships other than their dramatic one with Jesus
• the visual portent of the crosses / gibbets Jesus and the disciples pas on their way between Jerusalem and Bethany makes the cross loom less as prophecy and more as grim reality

What I wasn’t particularly impressed by

• the opposition of Law and compassion, which seemed to be Lutheran Paulinism filtered by late Romanticism
• the almost gnostic repeated emphasis on the kingdom of God being within sat oddly with the very human and political portrayals
• the very human (almost “mere man”) portrayal of Jesus jarred when set alongside statements such as “I’m his (God’s) only son” (the story was over-heavy on Jeremias’ omnipresent Father language), or the Virgin Mary’s seemingly overt confession of the virginal conception
• the rewriting of Jesus’ teaching which lost poetic resonances and rendered it rather anodyne (however commendable the attempt to avoid Bible English)

One or two things jarred: why, for example, was Joseph of Arimathea black? More importantly, I couldn’t help wondering how much of this would make sense to someone who didn’t know the story. While a lot of the backdrop was filled in in brief allusions to the Galilean ministry, other things remained without explanation. Someone who didn’t know the story would be very hard-pressed to understand anything at all of the conversation between Mary (BVM variety) and Jesus, or the dramatic tension in the closing moments of this episode’s dialogue, where Jesus asks Judas what is in his heart.

But one the whole, the positives, so far, seriously outweigh the negatives, and it looks set to shape up as one of the better renditions of the story on screen, especially with the moody and often claustrophobic lighting giving a sense of gathering peril and clouds of confusion. I look forward to catching the remainder.

written by doug