‘Christ’ review sparks a passionate rebuke

Times film critic Kenneth Turan, a.k.a. Father Turan since he now dabbles in Christology, gives us a bizarre display of punditry in his emotive review of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” a film he confesses left him “in the grip of a profound despair” (“A Narrow Vision and Staggering Violence,” Feb. 24). Putting aside his personal, psychic pain for a moment, Turan is right on one account: “People of goodwill will see this film in completely different ways.”

Acquiescing to its witching “marketing genius,” I’ve just returned from a midnight, Ash Wednesday viewing at the ArcLight. In contrast to our “disheartened” critic, I found the film profoundly moving, neither anti-Semitic nor gratuitously violent. But then I’ve always been a Peckinpah fan.

Of course, Father Turan tells us all we need to know: why we like it -- because we are the “devout”; why we don’t like it -- we are not the devout; what’s not to like -- “blood guilt” and “horrific” blood everywhere; and in a final act of censorial if not ecclesiastical hubris, why martyrdom-loving Gibson should have focused on the “world-transforming teachings” of Jesus versus the “unthinkable” and “unspeakable punishment for our sins.”

The denouement for me is when Turan suggests to the faithful how they should expand their Ash Wednesday reflections by pondering Gibson’s film as “not the best way to make the world a more humane, a more livable, a more peaceful place.”

It’s an odd review, really, more of a censure than criticism, visceral in its indictment -- “incendiary ... sadistic ... unspeakably savage” -- wittingly wanting Gibson to suppress or alter what is for hundreds of millions of people a fairly accurate depiction of their faith narrative -- their dramatized ecce homo, if you will, bleeding and bruised for the sins of the world, with no one to blame. Can you imagine Turan asking Muslim or Jewish filmmakers to change a portrayal of their sacred text to satisfy his exegetical revisionism?

At the risk of igniting “a minefield”: Turan doesn’t quite get it.

The Christian “devout” in this country are not a monolithic block. Sometimes to a fault, the conservative devout (fundamentalists, evangelicals, charismatics, etc.) are Israel’s staunchest supporters in its struggle for a peaceful sovereignty. Ironically, it is the liberal devout, those who fear this film might “comfort the anti-Semites,” who are repeatedly portraying Israel in their peace ministries and antiwar marches as an apartheid-like state repressing a freedom-loving Palestine.

Now here is a real versus fabricated “fissure” to be concerned with. From the parlors of Pasadena to the sunrooms of Santa Barbara, Ariel Sharon is being compared to Hitler and Israelis to Afrikaners. Ultimately, egregious as it would be, I am not concerned with some fringe nut finding inspiration in the Passion story to defame a synagogue; I am profoundly concerned about a suicide bomber being christened as a freedom fighter and feeling justified in blowing up a diner in Jerusalem.

Let us not be “flummoxed” by the Gospel according to Father Turan. It’s not the Passion narrative as filmed by Gibson that will fan the tragically renascent flames of anti-Semitism. Unless one misguidely infuses this film with “blood libel,” “The Passion of the Christ” will not “separate people.” It will not “foster divisiveness.”

Why? Because it is a story of forgiveness -- period. It may spark honest dialogue, and that is a good thing. Sometimes it is more important to recognize and confront our “fissures” than to ignore them.

What Turan doesn’t get is that everyone of “goodwill” is entitled to his or her faith narrative, even if they believe that narrative to be the ultimate truth. Artistic and religious freedom is in respecting the right of the true believer to hold that narrative, and in turn, asking that believer to honor yours.