Mel Gibson has made the most anticipated, revered, reviled, and talked-about film of recent memory. So much has been said about this movie even before its release, it seems difficult to add anything new and pointless to linger over the backstory. The Passion of the Christ focuses on the last twelve hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, from his arrest in the Garden to his death on the cross. The film is notoriously, outrageously violent, a sustained brutalization relieved only by brief flashbacks. Jewish organizations feared the film would stir up anti-Semitic feelings — considering Passion Plays have fanned such flames in the past, considering Mel Gibson's extremely conservative brand of Catholicism, and (despite the director's disavowels of such sentiments) unable to ignore Gibson's Holocaust-denying father. Many Christians, especially Evangelicals, have embraced the film as a powerful devotional aid and the greatest opportunity for evangelism in two-thousand years — to quote one slogan among the barrage of advertising/tracts (the mixed motives involved there have also been criticized.) People have been talking about Jesus Christ, constantly: in the international media, in synagogues and mosques, online and around the water cooler.

Amid the sensory overload — the deafening debate, the blinding hucksterism and the mind-numbing violence — its easy to miss the fact that The Passion of the Christ is an exceedingly well-directed film. This movie is not without its faults, but the right and smart and original choices add up, and these — if not the result of Holy Spirit directing, as the director once insinuated — are certainly not the result of an accident. The choice (to begin with) to make a hyper-violent Passion, in the original languages, is both brilliant and daring — the violent part even obvious, in hindsight, considering the long tradition of pious meditation upon the gory details in Catholic art and devotion. Gibson pulls off enough of his radical vision to leave no doubt that this was much more than the crackpot idea it first seemed. The art direction is sumptuous without being ostentatious. The cinematography is crisp and expansive and yet achieves DP Caleb Deschanel's goal of evoking the work of Renaissance painters like Caravaggio. Gibson's shot choices and camera movement are solid and occasionally surprising in their creativity. His casting, handling of the actors, and story structure are first rate. The use of parallel editing is very effective — cutting between, for example, the Triumphal Entry and the Via Dolorosa, or the Eucharistic bread and wine and the body and blood of Crucifixion. This is the best-designed, most cinematic, and freshest edited of all Jesus movies, and holds its own among stronger genres than that one. (Though it is a bit intriguing to consider what sort of film might have resulted from an even more aggressive delinearization…)

But this Passion is not without notable flaws. The film is not a conventional narrative, but rather aims at a single, sustained dramatic effect — punctuated by flashbacks, but also broken up by elements one could argue rupture the cohesiveness of the whole. The naturalism of the scourging and other Stations of the Cross are accompanied by symbolic touches: Satan crawling with maggots and snakes or carrying a demon-baby, the nightmarish visions of Judas after he's done his evil deed. These touches seem less part of a photo-realistic picture than a Medieval fresco. There are also tonal clashes: breathtaking realism collides violently (as if the film needed more violence!) with melodrama and sentimentalism. The CGI "teardrop of God" at the climactic moment might have played better if it had been the first drop in a deluge, something many movie Gospels have used to conclude the Crucifixion sequence. As it is, the effect imposes manufactured sentiment on a devastating moment that should have been left alone. Another strange note is injected into the sobering proceedings in the flashback scene where Jesus the carpenter fashions a modern table that his incredulous mother says "will never catch on." Some in audiences always laugh at that one, but I found it almost as painful as another crack of that cat-o-nine-tails: because it falls flat, but also because it wastes the one and only chance to sketch the mother-son relationship in better times. That scene is not anywhere near as effective as similar domestic moments in the 1999 tv-mini-series Jesus, which was able to effect a deep backstory with only a few brushstrokes. Likewise, Gibson's disciples are a little generic — though admittedly we see most of them only in flashbacks.

Would that the director had carved a few additional moments from the film in places notable for the opposite problem, excessiveness. Gibson has said he deliberately pushed "over the edge" with his depiction of violence, and in my view he pushed in several places too far. Note I'm not making that judgment from a standpoint of my reaction to violence, but from an aesthetic standpoint. I can appreciate his artistic choice to exaggerate the violence. I just thought he overdid it: an extra swat here, and extra push there, multiple falls — it adds up to ridiculous totals and that's not the effect he was going for. As an index of the excess, Gibson cleaves the entire Temple at the earthquake upon Christ's death — even though Scripture indicates it was only the Veil of the Holy of Holies that was so torn. The moment when the crow pecks the eye of the thief on the Cross seems at least twice as nasty as it should be, fodder for those who say the film is sadistic and vengeful — and also for rebuttal of those who claim any problem with this film really involves a beef with Scripture, which is notably brief on the details and missing many included here.

Gibson proves himself capable of understatement and nuance. The Roman commander on horseback who follows the progress of Christ along the path to his execution is clearly being irrevocably changed along the way. By the time the sky has darkened and the wind whips up over Golgotha, we realize who this soldier is and dread that he's going to utter the line that John Wayne ruined possibly forever in the The Greatest Story Ever Told. In fact, he is the guy, but he doesn't say the line — "Surely this was the Son of God" — not verbally, at least, but he does with his expression. An example both that the director can throttle back when he wants to, and of how the power of image can triumph over words in — at long last — a truly cinematic translation of the Gospel.

   Given their differences with Catholics over Scripture and tradition, it seems ironic that the most energetic support for this film has come from Evangelicals. Mel Gibson remains fairly uncomfortable in that particular culture, judging from his interactions with it. At a pre-release screening/pep rally near Chicago, Gibson coyly resisted efforts to convert his own musings on his film into the host pastor's Evangelicalese. Evangelicals emphasize "the Word," generally operating in a world where moral can be cleanly extracted from story, picture reduced to caption; they tend to be uneasy in the face of poetry and mystery. The characteristic Evangelical reductionism may also be seen in their seizing upon the film as a "tool" for evangelism and often glib dismissals of Jewish fears of anti-Semitism. Skeptics have reason to cringe at the thought of an army of evangelists preparing to pounce upon viewers rendered numb by a devastating film to channel that experience into the pat terms of this tradition. Of course, there may well be some conversions in an opposite sort of direction: perhaps the encounter with the Unspeakable as presented in this visual and visceral Gospel will shatter certain Evangelicals' rigid categories, provoking an evolution in their way of interacting with art and image that may have broader ramifications for their entire culture. Something like that might actually change the world. Meanwhile, The Passion of the Christ has already generated some of the most sustained and intense public discussion of the claims of Christ and the meaning of his death since it happened. Surely the film will factor in many conversions to Christianity. Then again, some viewers will shrug it off, then turn around and rent Time Bandits and be so cut to the quick watching it that they become Christians. That's how these things usually work; God's ways remain stubbornly mysterious.

Also mysterious is the phenomenon wherein so many opinions on the film withdraw into "either/or" extremes. This may actually be the most polarizing film ever made — no surprise, some say, given the subject matter. Yet it seems presumptuous to attribute the radical disparity of views on this film soley to the subject matter. Surely one more reason this film is polarizing is because it leaves so much to viewers' individual interpretation, according to their own experience and inclination. If you don't believe me, consider the director's admission of surprise that Evangelicals have embraced a film he set out to make especially Marian. Gibson's personal view of Mary assigns the Mother of God "Co-Redemptrix" status with Christ, a belief that would normally trigger theological car-alarms among Evangelicals — except they haven't seen enough onscreen evidence for their alarms to go off. Just as many Jews don't see much onscreen evidence for the Christian assertion that "we all killed Jesus". That bit of backstory the viewer has to bring with him to the theater or otherwise make conclusions based on onscreen evidence.

What is onscreen here is a treatment of Jewish authorities often as sympathetic and one-dimensional as Bolshevik filmmakers' treatment of the Czar. This is the most serious instance of exaggeration connected with this film. Pointing it out is not the same as suggesting Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic, or that his film will provoke a wave of persecutions. Or that there hasn't been some overreaction to the film by detractors, both Jewish and Christian. Jewish and even secular detractors have been as glib as the defenders, presuming to scold the film for leaving out the "true" Christian message. And certain denials of at least some Jewish culpability in the events depicted require one to stop believing that mobs act like mobs and the powerful don't behave as human nature and history have always shown them to, both Jewish and Christian (just ask Joan of Arc). My own suspicion is that Mel Gibson's failure to introduce more nuance among the religious authorities and their motives will leave a permanent question mark over this film. The Temple Guards are particularly cartoonish, with guttural cackles and clanking metal like Klingons (the commander even wears an eyepatch, a dead ringer for General Chang in Star Trek VI.) One detects a bit of the twitchy weirdness of Gibson himself in the more exaggerated thuggish bits — in both the Roman and Jewish thugs, which suggests evidence less of anti-Semitic feelings than a recurring lack of directorial restraint. Nevertheless, for those who bring to this film, first of all, memories of a two-thousand year scourging in the name of Jesus, a history that has been inflamed by such caricatures, it should not be considered unreasonable if they feel their own alarms going off.

People have also raised the question of context for this story, but I think that when it comes to this story that question is trickier than one first might think. The notion of "context" suggests that one can be true to the details while simultaneously false to the "bigger picture" — just as surely as Christ's warning to Pharisees that one can follow the letter of the Law and miss the Spirit. In the Bigger Picture, the Jews are much more than Pharisees or politicians, and more in this story than archetypal baddies or foils for Christ. Likewise, in the Bigger Picture, Christ's life on earth involved much more than just his death. Many have complained that Gibson's telling of the Greatest Story leaves out all the good parts: the sermons, the parables, the healings. On the other hand, the undeniable advantage of this narrowcast Passion is that it paradoxically restores a certain context to the life of Christ: the film neutralizes the common strategy of saving Jesus from what has been called "the Scandal of the Cross" by making him out to be a Great Moral Teacher, or a political revolutionary, or a prophet of non-violence. The supernatural genius of the Incarnation is that everything Christ had to say and teach is embodied, literally, in the Passion, the Word becomes flesh. Too much flesh, some obviously complain of the Mel Gibson version. But it's worth remembering that it's always taken a severe tug away from heaven and toward earth in order to keep even Christian theology in the proper balance between those two fundamental extremes. Sure, Jesus was a Great Moral Teacher, but he was and is greater even than that, not least because his teaching wasn't something to be abstracted into a System (contra the Evangelicals) but woven inextricably into these particular historical events: contextualized.

There's one more place this boiling-down-to-the-essence of the Gospel may restore context, and that's among the bumper-sticker faithful who tend to proclaim without thought that they "want to be like Jesus". ("Really?" observers will now be responding. Er, which Station of the Cross can we write you down for?)

   "It is as it was," the Pope was widely reported to have said after a private Vatican screening of the film. Of course, this would-be papal endorsement was subsequently clouded by an odd controversy over what — if anything — the Pope actually said. And so what began as an apparent affirmation of the historicity of the film ended as an ironic demonstration of just how difficult it can be to know what happened in history. The arguments over this film will not be resolved, and just listening to intelligent people argue with passion indeed, from complete opposite extremes, is enough to make you shrug, like Pilate, "What is truth?" (Or, in this case, "Quod est veritas?") At a certain point I feel like this is Mel Gibson's vision, as he has himself admitted, and alot of the confident assertions of what he should have done, put in, left out, seem curiously out of place for discussion of an individual artist's work.

At the same time, many of the polarities of opinion on this film run through my own experience of it. I continue to go back and forth as I reflect on the film. Certainly other films, featuring Christ or not, have touched me more, seemed more spiritually significant to me. Yet the unprecedented and simultaneous global examination of the claims and meaning of the Passion of Christ is extraordinary and one has to wonder what will come of it. One wonders, for example, how it will play among the Dalits (aka "Untouchables") in India, a people already poised on the verge of mass conversion to Christ, watching this brutal and unjust abuse of an outcast by the powerful. Or the Chinese Christians, who will someday surprise the rest of the world with just how many of them there are, enduring patiently their own ongoing persecutions. Or those Muslims who honor martyrdom but get things backwards by forcibly taking innocent lives, taking a look at history's preeminent example of sacrifice as a model of true love. (Of course, I also am wondering how Muslim viewers will react to Gibson's Caiphas and Sanhedrin here, too.) It's hard not to keep thinking of all the people Gibson shows us following along the Via Dolorosa, just watching, being changed forever just by watching.

There can be no doubt that Mel Gibson has made an important film — not necessarily a great film, but certainly a highly-significant one. It will remain a touchstone for many years as a social phenomenon, a media event, for Judeo-Christian and Catholic-Evangelical relations, and — lest we forget — as a film itself. The Passion of the Christ is flawed, but often brilliant. Without a doubt, it is one of the most audacious gambles in the history of the cinema. Whether or not Gibson's Hollywood radioactivity will wear off enough in a year for the film to be given Oscar consideration is really irrelevant. One hopes he hasn't trashed his career. Even if he has, and even if he's characteristically taken his own personal martyr-complex at times to extremes, the story he has told will comfort him as he carries his own cross. In the meantime, he's left the whole world in an uproar with this film. Perhaps it would be better for him to be saved from the temptation to try to follow-up an accomplishment like that.