Losing
Mel’s Religion
A medieval spiritual drama without passion.
The Reckoning
Directed by Paul McGuigan
The Passion of the Christ hasn’t just made an impression on American moviegoers by being sincere, skillful, insensitive and bloody. It has made an impression by proclaiming faith as its topic, then refusing to pull a bait-and-switch and turn religion into a plot device or a secular editorial on the hypocrisies of religion. The latter refusal is so rare that it automatically stands Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie apart from almost any other drama you can name–even big-budget films that are supposedly about faith and the people who practice it. Gibson’s retro-conservative, super-Catholic retelling of Christ’s death and resurrection locates the source of Christ’s divinity not in his soul or his mind, but in his body, which is beaten, flayed, pierced, whipped and crucified, yet refuses to relinquish its holy radiance.
This is a physicalized approach to Christianity, to be sure–a pacifist’s Braveheart. But Gibson is entitled to it, and the result is certainly worth seeing and worth fighting about. Gibson is the most visually gifted movie star to pick up a camera since Charles Laughton made The Night of the Hunter back in 1955. (Note the daring, vertical wipe that emotionally connects Jesus, imprisoned underground, with his mother aboveground, as well as the brief but politically supercharged glance exchanged between Jesus and a Nubian in Herod’s court. These are touches Sam Peckinpah would have been proud of.)
More important than Gibson’s talent is his sincerity. The Passion is a rare film that exudes faith in a higher power. The director personalizes (even peculiarizes) his faith to a degree that is sure to alienate millions of ticket buyers, Christian and non-Christian alike–and thrill millions more. The movie is unquestionably anti-Semitic, probably through carelessness rather than design. But if this rotten flaw cancels out all of the movie’s virtues, then it follows that critics should immediately cease defending sexist, racist, violent movies like Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Brian De Palma’s Scarface–or for that matter, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Can we all grow up and admit that movies, like people, are rarely all good or all bad?
Despite the film’s flaws–and The Passion has many, detailed at length in my original Feb. 25 review–a failure to take faith seriously is not among them. Few recent Hollywood movies can make that claim. The 1986 movie version of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, for instance, was set in and around a monastery, yet it used the setting mainly as a pretext for a Sherlock Holmes-style murder mystery with Gothic trappings. The proudly awful Priest wasn’t really about the priesthood at all, but a cliched urban potboiler whose main objective was to attack Catholicism (and by extension, all religion) as hypocritical and worthless. Gandhi and Malcolm X both displayed an occasional willingness to deal with their title characters’ relationship to faith–stress on "occasional."
Martin Scorsese would seem an exception to this pattern. He’s often cited as directing films that are alive with religious feeling. But it’s more accurate to say that Scorsese’s movies are alive with religious anxiety and uncertainty. Charlie in Mean Streets and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver testing themselves against flame, Cape Fear’s tattooed, fundamentalist hobgoblin Max Cady wreaking Old Testament vengeance on a hypocritical upper-middle-class Southern family– Scorsese’s self-conscious sinner characters are wracked by fear that they’ll someday be punished for failing to fear God and Satan. Even Scorsese’s Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ actively doubts both himself and his mission, and keeps doubting even after his Holy Father zaps him with miracles. Ironically, the most straightforwardly religious picture of Scorsese’s career isn’t Temptation, or even Kundun, but Bringing Out the Dead–a paramedic drama set in a medievalized Manhattan populated by fallen souls searching for redemption, their grimy bodies bathed in cinematographer Robert Richardson’s ethereal cones of light.
And what of Spielberg? He’s an iffy case. His movies are wondrous, yet they contain no specifically, pointedly religious feelings. True, they often traffic in Christ imagery, but this factoid certifies nothing; the same claim can be made for hundreds of music videos. Spielberg is one of the great living filmmakers, and his movies suggest faith in a higher power, all right, but it’s a nonspecific, can-do, American variety of faith–a cuddly, non-divisive belief in the redemptive power of innocence (think of E.T.’s Lazarus pose in the back of that ambulance), and in the human imagination’s capacity to alter reality.
On first glance, The Reckoning sounds nearly Gibsoneseque: a hardcore, Old Testament alternative to Scorsese’s intellectual brooding and Spielberg’s hand-holding; just look at the title, for Christ’s sake. Unfortunately, this collaboration between actor Paul Bettany and director Paul McGuigan–about a troupe of actors in medieval England trying to solve a murder–turns out to be yet another film that uses faith and religious iconography as a narrative red herring. It comes on with an evangelistic seriousness, but it’s contrived and unserious; an echo of Eco.
The first five minutes are eerie and powerful, a supple flashback sequence that depicts Bettany’s young priest, Father Nicholas, succumbing to the temptations of the flesh, sleeping with a parishioner and being hounded from his parish. Kneeling by a riverbank, he shaves his head–an attempt at disguise made sensuous and faux-ritualistic through the director’s use of slow motion–and then flees the scene of his sin and hooks up with the aforementioned acting troupe. The leader of the troupe is Martin (Willem Dafoe, whose wood-carved grin always did seem medieval). Martin is a restless actor who’s tired of performing the same old costume pantomimes based on the Bible.
Father Nicholas joins the troupe as it journeys to a small mountain hamlet where a woman named Martha is about to be executed for the murder of a young boy. After a bit of nosing around by Martin and Father Nicholas, the intrepid actors (whose ranks include blustery Brian Cox) decide to stage a play jumping off from the details of the case. Their aim is twofold: to generate controversy and box-office admissions, and to flush out the boy’s real killer. (It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines drama, pre-Gutenberg.)
I haven’t read the source material–a Booker-nominated novel by Barry Unsworth called Morality Play–so I am not qualified to say whether The Reckoning’s lack of interest in spiritual matters replicates the author’s original intent or distorts it. Whatever the evolution from stage to screen, the result is a film that ignores the promising core of its own concept, namely Father Nicholas’ betrayal of his faith and his desperate, even foolhardy attempts to redeem himself through art. The outlines of this story are still present, but they’re pro-forma, a plot device to permit the hero to play Miss Marple. Scene for scene, the filmmaker takes the young priest’s spiritual distress no more seriously than Renny Harlin took the emotional distress of Sylvester Stallone’s rock climber in Cliffhanger. Like so many Hollywood movies, this European co-production treats faith as a plot device, specifically a scam. As in Priest, it’s an opiate of the masses, useful mainly as a device to keep the peasants enslaved by their master, a decadent and effete French Dauphin. (The latter is played by Vincent Cassel of Brotherhood of the Wolf and Irreversible, a strapping hunk with a broken-prow profile and an insinuating sneer. Cassel is a depressingly obvious casting choice, a go-to Movie Frenchman whose screen image teases and certifies stereotypes of French manhood. It’s only a matter of time before Interpol arrests him for stealing Jean Reno’s career.)
McGuigan and Bettany have matured since their first collaboration, the calling-card effort Gangster No. 1, a cartoonish, showy crime fable that seemed designed mainly to shock and impress. But their artistic chemistry is one of the few real sources of pleasure to be had here. The always-capable Dafoe seems goofy and manic (he even does handstands). Cox is bluff and likable as always. The "as always" part of that description is troublesome; I’d hate to think such a good actor is at risk of becoming predictable. But it’s the absence of serious religious feeling that’s most depressing. The movie is perilously close to being a spoof of itself. Think of The Mouse Trap, the play-within-a-play from Hamlet, minus the context of Hamlet. Or Shakespeare in Love without Shakespeare–or love.
