Arts
The hour is early morning; an otherworldly blue haze swirls over the Garden of Gethsemane. Off in a quiet corner, an anguished man kneels in prayer, his brow and tousled hair dripping with sweat, as he quietly struggles to put to rest some inner dilemma.
In this opening scene of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," the anguished man alone in the garden is, of course, Jesus Christ moments before his arrest.
Yet what is most striking about this opening scene is precisely how human this Jesus is, how ordinary he seems as he prepares to meet his crucifixion.
Indeed, throughout the movie, Gibson's Jesus remains, above all, human -- and it is in so humanizing Jesus that the film is at its most powerful.
All of the dialogue is in Aramaic, Latin or Hebrew, seemingly to prevent translation from creating yet another degree of separation between the viewer and the human Jesus.
In flashbacks throughout the film, we see non-Biblically based flashbacks of Jesus' childhood again seemingly calculated to humanize him.