After two decades of speculation following Mel Gibson’s groundbreaking The Passion of the Christ, it’s finally official: a sequel will begin shooting this summer in Italy. Like the first film, The Resurrection of the Christ will seek to challenge audiences as a wild work of cinema in a world (and a Church) growing devoid of anything like bold originality in art.
Rome’s Cinecittà Studios confirmed the upcoming shoot of Gibson’s second biblical epic to stoke the fervor achieved by his 2004 runaway hit. With Jim Caviezel as Jesus Christ, The Passion made $612 million worldwide against its $30 million budget (which Gibson largely self-financed).
While The Passion presented the final twelve hours of Jesus’ life in potent and painful detail, The Resurrection will reportedly explore what happened in the three days before Easter Sunday, including the harrowing of Hell, the war of the angels, and other apocalyptic sequences.
Doubting-Thomas moviegoers will have to see it to believe it, as it all sounds pretty controversial. But controversy is the legacy of The Passion, acclaimed as it is by Christians and Catholics and even serving as a Holy Week staple for many. The difficulty of the film lies mostly in its graphic violence, as it does not shy away from the explicit details of Jesus’ torturous suffering and death—while secular audiences questioned and criticized Gibson’s portrayal of the Jews.
“There was a lot of opposition to it,” Gibson recalled, knowing what Hollywood millstones feel like. “I think if you ever hit on this subject matter, you’re going to get people going.” With an artistic reputation for brutal violence and a personal reputation for boorish comments, Gibson may be guilty as charged, but his reverence for the subject matter of The Passion is clear even if his treatment is arguable.
“It’s a big subject matter,” Gibson has said about The Passion,
and my contention was, when I was making it, it was like, you’re making this film, and the idea was that we’re all responsible for this, that His sacrifice was for all mankind, and for all our ills and all the things in our fallen nature. It was a redemption.
Well said by an artist who knows what he is about. A film about Jesus Christ should strive to be sacred art, that is, a work of art that is used in a public or private context for evangelization, contemplation, or education in the Faith. A film can do this if done boldly, as Gibson demonstrates, and many—if not all—have fallen short of the mark he hit.
The Last Supper, in theaters now, doesn’t make anything new as any true creative act does, and as such it fails in a central artistic purpose, with a Messiah played by Jamie Ward that is too straightforward to be stirring. It doesn’t take the risk of Gibson’s quivering Christ in shredded skin. There’s Jonathan Roumie’s surfer-bro Messiah in The Chosen, also in theaters, which borders on the tacky in its desire to appeal and doesn’t go far enough with the conundrums of the God Man. Then there are those that go too far, with heretical blasphemies like Willem Dafoe’s Jesus being tempted by Mary Magdalene in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 drama The Last Temptation of Christ.
These treatments aren’t as successful as Gibson’s feature because they are not as artistically meaningful—they don’t take on as much as the subject demands. Meaningfulness comes with calculated risk, as all worthy things do, and that risk lies in an honesty which is often dangerous, especially when it comes to depicting the mysteries of faith.
So many “Jesus movies” fall prey to a tepid trend of sentimentalism, being too safe to be significant. It is not so much dangerous as it is damaging, and this schmaltziness poses a central problem in sacred art today. Despite decent production values and pure intentions, films like The Last Supper may not be egregiously offensive against the Catholic call to produce high artistic representations of the highest artistic material, but they never reach the height of what has already been produced by Gibson.
It may not be fair to compare shows like The Chosen or films like The Last Supper so directly with the record-shattering triumph and ongoing legacy of The Passion, but it is a natural critical inclination. Considering films on their own merits is possible, but it is impossible to avoid acknowledging that the bar is high. The Passion is a powerful film, and it’s good that this story of stories has been given strong treatment, demanding that artists rise to new occasions in taking on this narrative which deserves and demands retelling.
