MetaCatholic

The third part of the BBC Passion aired tonight (most appropriately). See my comments on parts one and two here. Generally I continue to feel pretty much as I felt about the earlier episodes: this is a bit of a mixed bag, with the good clearly outweighing the  — well not so much bad as odd, or even confused.

There were a few particularly striking visual and dramatic notes. The temporary storage of Jesus in a dungeon = covered hole in the ground, between Sanhedrin trial and being taken before Pilate, was both the most interesting, historically plausible, and dramatically effective liberty the script took with the gospel narratives. The actual placing of the cross in its socket, shot from above as a bird’s eye view of the crucifixion was extremely well done, as was the visual composition of the moment of death, framed as the climax of an exchange of glances from Jesus to Mary, to the heavens.

One feature that any Jesus film brings home is the difficulty of narrating the terse stories of the gospels over anything like a sufficiently dramatic time span when portrayed on the screen. This was part of the effectiveness of the imprisoning of Jesus in a kind of well in Caiaphas’ courtyard. It gave a sense of time passing to the events, without seriously elongating the trial scenes with invented dialogue.

On the negative side were some jarring moments. There is a tendency throughout the script to assume that phrases like “Son of God” have the benefit of several centuries accrual of Christian meaning, and the attempt to put “terse Biblish” into more expansive and explanatory everyday English sometimes heightens this tendency to read Christian doctrine in. “”When I’m gone, do this to bring me back among you” is, shall we say, a rather controversial interpretation of “Do this in remembrance of me.”

I felt further disconnected by the way in which this Last Supper scene is fairly full of Johannine statements similarly translated, as Jesus tells the disciples: “If you have seen me, you have seen God”. Dramatically this Johannine Jesus segues extremely oddly into the very distressed and distraught Jesus of the Synoptics’ Gethsemane scene. It is one of the perils of harmonisation that elements belonging to one story do not sit comfortably in another. The anguished Jesus of Mark inhabits a very different world to the total control exerted by John’s Jesus.

Despite the attempts of the Telegraph and others to create a synthetic row over the crucifixion scenes, I have to say that in most respects this was extremely traditional, not to say conventional. I can’t make up my mind whether Mary kisses the cross as a surrogate for being unable to reach her son’s feet, or whether it felt like the shadow of later devotion. Most of the traditional words are (albeit reworded) included. The oddest exception for anyone who knows the story is that “Father, forgive them …”, rather than the promise of paradise, comes as the response to the “penitent thief”. The supposedly controversial portrayal of the means of crucifixion seemed both plausible and convincing, and I really liked the matter-of-fact, detached but not unsympathetic, professionalism of the Roman soldiers going about their tasks. (The non-leg-breaking scene and dialogue was particularly well done, and the mild liberty with John’s narrative was fresh and original — as far as I know.)

I’m not quite so certain why they chose to make such a fuss about “historical reconstructions” here, however. If I were being nit-picky, I would want to point out the way in which a loincloth still preserves Jesus’ modesty in this production, to say nothing of the extraordinary distance from the city we seem to have gone for the place of execution. There’s not much point crucifying someone that far off the beaten track. And what was that titulus doing in Latin only? Latin that the taunting brigand and fellow crucifyee appeared to be able to read.

Those are, to be fair, minor quibbles, but it would have been nice to see this kind of background historical reconstruction being more consistent, even if narrative harmonisation is almost inevitable. Generally, I remain impressed by a production that manages to inject some real notes of freshness into such a well known story, while, I think, making it accessible to those who might hardly know it at all.