Apocalypto
Directed by Mel Gibson
Mel Gibson’s press whipping for The Passion of the Christ was like no other movie vilification seen in my lifetime. In Hollywood history, the closest equivalent might have been the campaign launched against Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, but even then the critics, at least, rescued Welles as an artist. The unfairness of the attack on Gibson was brought to light when Quentin Tarantino—of all people, God bless him—in an L.A. Weekly interview with John Powers, stood up, proclaiming: “I think it actually is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I’ve seen since the talkies—as far as telling a story in pictures. So much so that when I was watching this movie, I turned to a friend and said, ‘This is such a Herculean leap of Mel Gibson’s talent. I think divine intervention might be part of it.’”
Tarantino’s assessment of Gibson’s directorial merits also apply to the passion on screen in Apocalypto. It’s the coolest movie title of the year, but it also indicates a romantic vision of civilization and its threats (to paraphrase John Ford’s judgment at the end of Stagecoach). Gibson has made a direct allegory about the decline of the West, but he audaciously sets it 600 years back to the decline of the Mayans. Is that distanced enough from the political platform of the Christian Right to spare Gibson the ire of liberal editorial boards? Serious moviegoers will once again recognize the intense visual imagination and dedication that Gibson brings to film directing. It wasn’t there in Braveheart, where he tried out the blunt and bloody acrobatics of the action movies that made him popular from Mad Max to The Patriot. Only viciously, politically-biased, anti-art pundits can deny that lately, with these two films, Gibson has been thinking in visual terms and putting most American movie directors to shame.
In fabricating a past civilization, Gibson’s vision is no less scrupulous than Terrence Malick’s in The New World. The Central American tribespeople, elaborate pyramids, lush jungles and exotics rituals are spellbinding. Gibson details public rituals that exalt the society’s self-infatuation. It’s as if the ornate, paranoid, polytheistic cityscape of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has been reimagined as history. Gibson introduces his central character, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), with the simplicity of a silent movie hero. The Aztec dialog (like the Aramaic in The Passion of the Christ) forces viewer concentration on Jaguar Paw’s Everyman plight: He sees the society’s degradation and its threat to his humanity; his escape turns into an intense, eye-filling odyssey.
This idea isn’t exactly original, but it is presented in ways that give Jaguar Paw’s story highly developed impact. He struggles against cynical forms of religiosity and politics (lessons that no doubt derive from Gibson’s own artistic search for meaning in political struggles.) Jaguar Paw’s race for life against social prescriptions is conveyed through Apocalypto’s vital imagery; it illustrates adventure but it also expresses, well, passion. This is what Tarantino was referring to when, in regards to The Passion, he exclaimed, “I cannot believe Mel Gibson directed it. Not personally Mel Gibson ... I meant I can’t believe any actor made that movie. This is like the most visual movie by an actor since Charles Laughton made The Night of the Hunter. No, this is 15 times more visual than that. It has the power of a silent movie.”
Sadly, silent movie aesthetics are not in fashion. Apocalypto runs second to the year’s most extraordinary example of silent film art, Julián Hernández’s Broken Sky, where clueless critics complained about the lack of dialogue. Gibson transcends that cultural barrier by insisting on linguistic realism (Yucatec with English subtitles), and this rigor compliments the integrity of his vivid imagery (photographed by Dean Semler). Scenes of Jaguar Paw chased by a jaguar or lying between tall tree branches bring to mind John Boorman’s anthropological vistas in The Emerald Forest. But the way Gibson connects Jaguar Paw’s agony and release to a sense of the world and the amazement of natural phenomena resurrects ancient movie virtues.
Apocalypto also resembles the 1932 film Bird of Paradise where Joel McCrea and Dolores del Rio made one of Hollywood’s quintessential forays into the wonders of ancient civilization. It was a Western imperialist romance with organic love story clichés, but its visual excitation came from the modern mind of director King Vidor. Gibson’s eyes and mind are anthropologically open. Apocalypto shows the highest artistic goal in images that are meant to be remembered and thought about. Gibson’ naïve heart and understanding of audience emotion (and, thus of spiritual feeling) is the quintessence that Tarantino instinctively, courageously admired. The story of Jaguar Paw—and the cinematic inscription of his knowledge of mankind and history—makes Apocalypto as bold as it dare be.
