Except for followers of the Marquis deSade, this is not a “spiritual” movie, and it sure won’t move the masses to acts of forgiveness and love. At least, I can’t imagine how this could be so.
The first 60-90 minutes of the film are cartoonishly hammy, especially the Sanhedrin who are inexplicably savage and blood-thirsty. The homo-erotic elements – there’s more heat between Pilate and his slave boy (a subconscious homage to Tony Curtis and Sir Laurence Olivier in “Spartacus”?) than between Pilate and his porceline doll wife, Claudia – are incongruous, the attempts to speak Aramaic are clumsily unconvincing (kind of like the wretched Elvish dialog in “Lord of the Rings”), and the flashbacks, distracting.
True to Mel Gibson’s consistently chauvinist viewpoint, the women are beautiful, passive, pure and above all, attentive to their main task of vicarious suffering.
On the other hand, the march to Calvary and the Crucifixion are very moving. In spite of her infuriating passivity, Mary is a remarkably sympathetic figure and your tears flow with her “flesh of my flesh, heart of my heart” speech.
Maia Morgenstern (Mary) and Hristo Naumov Shopov (Pilate) are the stars of the film. Notch a couple of points here for Eastern Europe’s theater and film community. The score has been criticized, but for me, it was more effective than the cinematography, which has been widely praised.
Two thousand years later, power still corrupts, and governments still oppress through the machinations of hired thugs and communal terror. Mel Gibson probably didn’t intend it this way, but his film is the best darned argument for the Second Amendment anyone could imagine.