Mel Gibson’s new movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” opened last Wednesday across the country to mixed reviews from critics, moviegoers and students along with the second-greatest five-day total in history.
The movie portrays the last hours of the life of Jesus Christ based predominantly on the New Testament of the Bible. University of Wisconsin students have voiced concern over the film’s anti-Semitic portrayals of Jewish people in the film, mostly with their roles in Christ’s death.
According to UW junior Joel Bennett, a practicing Jew who serves on the UW Hillel Board of Directors, this movie does indeed have anti-Semitic messages.
“I mainly think that this film reinforces stereotypes, particularly of European Jews. Jews in this film are all old men who have long grey beards and long noses, which is not what people looked like,” Bennett said, but added rational people would not become more apt to be racist because of the movie. “I don’t think that anyone is going to watch the film and become anti-Semitic as a result, but I do think that [this movie regresses] a lot of progress that the Catholic church and Jewish people have made in the last 30 to 40 years.”
Faye Darnall, chaplain at St. Paul’s University Catholic Center in Library Mall, did not see the movie in the same way Bennett did.
Darnall said film images of Jews are “cartoon-like,” but said this is because Gibson is not a very subtle thinker when it comes to movie making.
“I think that the anti-Semitism talk is, to some degree, hysteria,” Darnall said.
Part of the controversy is Gibson’s religious beliefs, which Bennett says are considered to be very traditional Roman Catholic beliefs. Many believe that these views might ignore any Vatican reforms made by the Catholic Church in the 1960s, which, according to Darnall, were meant to repudiate anti-Semitism and work toward reconciling Catholicism with all other religions.
However, not all students on the Madison campus are taking the movie in this serious manner. UW sophomore Michael Clay considers himself an agnostic and is not taking an extreme stance one way or the other.
“I think that this is just a movie, and people may be making too big of a deal out of it,” Clay said, admitting that he has not seen the movie yet but has spoken with many who have. “All the people I’ve talked to who have seen the movie have only mentioned how sad it was, and that it is awful that [the crucifixion] happened to a person.”
Clay said the Jewish stereotypes would be bad if they were deliberately meant to point fingers, but hopefully it is just meant to show the anecdotal history Christians follow.
Bennett said that this has been a major topic of conversation among his peers.
“I believe that a main reason why Gibson made this movie was to raise the level of debate, and it’s good that people are talking about something they might not already be familiar with,” Bennett said. “This [movie] is a work of art that is bringing the topic out of people’s dorm rooms and onto the larger campus, saying … ‘This is what we believe in, and our views are shared by others.'”
Darnall said he believes Gibson wants to emphasis the struggle of Jesus when he suffered and died for the salvation of humanity. Although she does not like to see a great deal of violence in films, she acknowledges that it may serve the purpose of a “wake-up call to what the crucifixion was” to viewers.
Though controversy surrounds the film, “Passion” has grossed the second-highest five-day total in history of $117.5 million and led all other movies with opening weekend earnings of more than $76 million.
The movie’s success may have been helped due to the fact that many churches and Christian organizations nationwide purchased entire showings in advance.
Carlo Petrick, director of communications for Marcus Theatres, said the distributor of the movie, Newmarket Films, did a lot of marketing to churches to encourage them to organize groups to buy out shows.
