For months, before anyone saw Passion - except the roughly 20,000 Christians, most evangelicals, whom the filmmaker invited to preview his work in progress - charges have flown. The most serious is that the interpretation set forth by Gibson, an ultra-conservative Catholic who rejects the 1960s reforms of the Second Vatican Council, will incite anti-Semitism.
The Pharisees, an influential Jewish elite, are cartoonishly evil, protested interfaith leaders, who read drafts of Passion's script and saw an early cut of the film. Responsibility for the crucifixion is laid squarely on the Jews, not shared with the Romans, they complained - and not just the high priest Caiaphas and his compatriots are guilty, but all Jews, for all time.
Inclusion of a passage from the Book of Matthew - "His blood be on us, and on our children," a curse attributed to the Jewish crowd in the Bible, but spoken by Caiaphas in the movie - incensed Jewish leaders who cited the Vatican's rejection of the blanket condemnation four decades ago. In the final cut of his film, in which the cast speaks only Aramaic and Latin, Gibson removed the line's subtitle. If you're up on your Aramaic, you can still hear it.
"OK, it may have alarmed people," says Gibson, worn but on message, in his suite overlooking a wide, smog-free swath of West Los Angeles.
But what the controversy has done, explains Passion's producer, director and cowriter, "is to make [audiences] look into their own faith. And it's made them look into the faith of the other person, too. . . . I think that it's bringing people together."
What the controversy has also done is generate reams of free publicity. For a film, and a distributor - the little independent Newmarket - working without a Hollywood studio's powerhouse marketing machine, the embroilment has been invaluable.
