Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was an unexpected sensation, earning more than $370 million domestically. Rather than being put off by the subject matter and the subtitles, audiences turned movie-going into a religious experience. Church organizations attended en masse. Those of the Christian faith almost felt an obligation to buy tickets and witness the cinematic description of their savior’s suffering.
Certainly, with a film that generated so much devotion, there has to be room among the five best picture nominees at this year’s Academy Awards.
Well, not exactly. “The Passion of the Christ” is unlikely to stir up the same enthusiasm at Oscar time that it did with audiences. Chances are Academy voters will be non-believers in this picture, regardless of their religious convictions.
Conspiracy theorists can take a seatFor those who feel the secular Hollywood elite will conspire to sabotage a religious-themed motion picture and deny it an honor it so richly deserves, they can save their breath. “Passion” will be ignored for practical reasons, not because of a bias toward the devout.
First off, we live in highly commercial times. Rare is the motion picture that is plucked out of obscurity and embraced by Academy voters without being accompanied by a good, old-fashioned marketing onslaught. In this case, Gibson has already declared he will not spend money to promote the film. Turning his back on the increasingly distasteful practice of trumpeting a movie for Oscar contention is a noble gesture.
But the downside is that every other picture in contention will be in full promotional mode between now and the voting deadline. And although the best picture landscape had appeared to be desolate only a few weeks ago, now it is somewhat more lush, with contenders that include “The Aviator,” “Finding Neverland,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Sideways,” “The Sea Inside,” “Closer,” “Kinsey” and “Ray,” as well as warmly received longshots like “Spiderman 2,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Kill Bill Vol. II,” “Shrek 2,” “The Bourne Supremacy” and “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
The phrase “timing is everything” also comes into play. There is a good reason studios release the films they deem most Oscar-worthy in December. Voters are human, they have short memories, and even if many of them happened to be impressed with “Passion” when it first unspooled on Ash Wednesday — February 25th — much of that buzz has long since disappeared, replaced by that of other films. “Passion” won’t even benefit from a timely DVD release, since that already happened way back on August 31st.
Reviews matter. One single notice means little. But if there is a collective drumbeat, an apparent consensus, then it creates a perception that the picture in question isn’t up to snuff artistically, a potentially lethal development where Oscar dreams are involved.
Generally, negative reviews of “The Passion of the Christ” seemed to outnumber the positive, or at least were so virulent as to overshadow the positive. Much of that sentiment came from Gibson’s decision to focus on the persecution of Christ rather than on his good deeds and kind words. A.O. Scott of The New York Times said the picture “is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than uplifting it.” David Denby of The New Yorker said “the movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beatings, blood and agony.”
Relgious films have triumphed before
There certainly will be a faction among Christians who believe Hollywood is opposed to honoring anything with a religious theme. Those people are just not students of history.
In 1953, “The Robe” received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, as did Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” in 1957. “Ben Hur,” subtitled “A Tale of the Christ,” was one of the most honored pictures in Hollywood history, winning 11 Academy Awards in 1960. More recently, in 1988, Martin Scorsese was nominated for Best Director for “The Last Temptation of Christ,” although that one rankled some of the fundamentalists for its controversial portrayal of Jesus as more of a flawed man than as the divine son of God.
In short, if a filmmaker can deliver the goods and tell a great story, the subject matter is almost irrelevant.
Then there is the charge leveled at “Passion” by some that it is anti-Semitic. Gibson’s portrayal of Jews and their participation in the death of Christ angered some in the Jewish community even before the picture was released. It didn’t help that Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton, is a Holocaust denier. While Mel Gibson told Diane Sawyer in an interview that he does not share his father’s views and called the Holocaust “an atrocity of monumental proportions,” he didn’t outright condemn his father’s inflammatory remarks, a fact that angered some Jewish leaders.
The depiction of Jews in “Passion” is a matter that obviously is open to individual interpretation. But with humans being human, it’s safe to say there might be some in the Academy voting body who did not take kindly to the way Jews were portrayed and will happily deny the film any recognition.
“The Passion of the Christ” succeeded mightily as a box-office sensation and as a catalyst for Christians and non-Christians alike to re-visit and re-examine the suffering of Jesus Christ. But that figures to be the extent of its appeal as far as the Academy is concerned.