Things have been so quiet on this blog that I figured I'd finally see The Passion and post my comments. Having seen it, however, I'm left with surprisingly little to say. I wasn't offended and I wasn't transported; I was left on the outside, looking in. This isn't really a criticism, just a regretful observation. Still, the fact that Mel Gibson has made a movie that speaks only to other true believers suggests that whatever The Passion is, it isn't cinema.

There is a great movie to be made from this material, and it's The Last Temptation of Christ. The crucial difference is Paul Schrader's incredibly literate and intricate screenplay, which I think is one of the best ever written. For obvious linguistic reasons, The Passion needs to be written in broader strokes, but there's still something vaguely troubling in Gibson's refusal to place his movie in any kind of context, or to specify who, precisely, his Jesus is supposed to be.

The brief flashbacks to Jesus's life in Nazareth offer glimpses of a much more interesting movie that could have been, even if they recall Woody Allen's line, "If Jesus was a carpenter, I wonder what he charged for bookshelves?"

In any case, I can't add much more beyond what has already been written, and of course, it's only because I'm a coastal American, insulated from the popular current that has already made The Passion one of the ten highest grossing films of all time, that these observations seem at all timely at this late date. I'm not sure if any of my friends, except for one, have even seen this movie. It isn't often that I feel like a cultural pioneer for seeing a movie that is on track to outgross Star Wars.