I'm not a devoutly religious person; I call myself Catholic, but my personal beliefs would fit more squarely within the defintion of agnosticism than any particular denomination. I take religion seriously, and take seriously the freedom to question and decipher its myths and teachings, but I can't accept it as anything more than history; I embrace the peaceful teachings of Jesus, and am fascinated by the possibility that he may have been more than man, but if I were to say that I wholeheartedly believed the doctrines about him, the statement would be without conviction.

Or would it? Perhaps I have more recesses of faith buried within me than I thought, because I was tremendously moved by Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ, despite my intentions to remain fully objective. My first reaction was that, due to the intensity of of the film, it would be impossible for any viewer not to be moved, regardless of their beliefs. After perusing the many reviews and opinions of the film, however, I see this isn't the case. There are those who find the film bombastic, offensive, boring, and/or obvious.

To be certain, making a film that consists primarily of its protagonist being graphically tortured and eventually killed, while those that love him watch helplessly, is an easy way to wrench sympathy from susceptible audiences. Using slow motion and dramatic music to further dramatize the proceedings, as Gibson does consistently, is also questionable; if the essence of the material is truly emotional, and if a director's intent was to show how it actually happened (as Gibson has attested), shouldn't he and his camera step aside and not influence us with the illusions of cinema? I, of course, couldn't have expected any less from the director of 'Braveheart,' but I did my best to remain critical, and found that I could not. The film is not a complete success in all accounts, but that didn't prevent me from giving in to the emotional appeal of the story.

Emotional appeal is something the story of Jesus has plenty of, regardless of whether you believe in the supernatural aspects of it; a sense of compassion is all that is needed to identify with most of his teachings. What this film does is free the story of context and focuses simply on Christ's sacrifice; whether it was divinely inspired or a delusional choice doesn't detract from the horror of his death, but nonbelievers may find the film effective yet pointless; a work of art with merit, but not cause.

Technically and dramatically, from a secular point of view, the film has no more faults than Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ, a film I value highly; open minded people will find that the two films are perfectly complimentary. Scorsese, also a Catholic, was not afraid to question the dual nature of Christ, and in doing so brilliantly externalized the inner struggle that a man who was also God would have had; at the same time, the beauty of the film's ideas was severely limited by the limits of its execution, and the cast, with their Brooklyn accents, go a long way to defeat the otherwise strident historical accuracy. In Gibson's movie, Christ is in physical shock for most of the running time; we can sympathize with his pain, but any understanding of who he is must be brought into the theater beforehand. And while Gibson's decision to have the actors speak solely in Aramaic and Latin is a great one, he also breaks this intense realism when he depicts Christ's crucifixion in the manner popularized by religious art: on a full cross, with nails piercing his palms.

At the same time, the harshness Gibson brings to this image that has been so whitewashed and neutralized over the centuries is certainly a good thing; it'll be tough to look at the image of a clean, white Jesus positioned laxly on a cross after seeing the blood that is spilt in such mass in this film.

Does the movie glorify the violence? It doesn't waver, but neither does Gibson shoot it with a total sadist's eye. The scourging sequence, in which Pilate tries to quell the Pharisees' thirst for death by having Jesus whipped to within inches of his life, is about as graphic as a film can be; but this scene, where there is ample opportunity for Gibson to revel in the gore, finds him instead cutting away to Mary's reaction. His consistent attention to the mother of Christ, something that was lacking in Scorsese's film, is a key sign that this is a film made by a Catholic, that being one of the few sects of Christianity that goes a step beyond merely acknowledging Mary's role in Jesus' life. She is played here by Maia Morgenstern , and her reaction to her son's ordeal provides an emotional anchor for the audience to attach to. There is one line of dialogue she utters, during the scourging, that makes me glad Gibson chose to use subtitles, because the movie would be lesser if we couldn't comprehend it.

The film's charges of anti-semitism are neither here nor there; there's cause for concern, and cause for dismissal. More troubling is the brief and unnecessary scene with King Herod, in which he's portrayed in a fey, stereotypically gay manner. Puzzling are the appearences by Satan, who most often takes the form of an androgynous figure, but also appears as a vaporous spirit and a crowd of children who drive Judas to hang himself; there is one vision of the humanoid figure holding a withered, leering infant that is fascinating and truly unsettling, and then another one at the end, which is supposed to suggest hell, that feels glaringly out of place.

My biggest qualm with the film comes near the end, when the walk to Golgotha is intercut with the moments from his minstry and the Last Supper, to good effect. Yet there is a major inconsistency present; we see Christ conveying his message to love one another, and to love one's enemy just as equally as anyone else; moments later, on the cross, the thief who famously rejects Christ is attacked by a crow and has his eye plucked out. It's an obvious act of vengeance on God's part, and it contradicts Christ's message. If you argue that Christ's teachings were relavant to mankind, and that God has the right to exact vengeance, I'd counter that dramatically, it's a cheap shot, the sort of 'just desserts' moment that would inspire applause in an action film, and it sours a scene of that has achieved a sort of unbiased purity.

And yet while I acknowledge all the problems in the film, I left the theater unwilling to criticize it. Where some reviewers have seen the reenactment of the passion as punishment to the audience, I saw it as poetry; the miraculous nature of the film's Christ is beautifully understated, and I think I recognized the touch of a filmmaker unwilling to beat a point over the audience's head. Except that he does, there's no denying it, and the fact that I didn't see it as such makes me question where my beliefs stand. The point of the film is that a man went through all of this for us; I'm not sure if that's why it meant so much for me, or simply because he went through it at all. I didn't leave the film with a new understanding of Christ, but I did feel a sense of compassion I'd never associated with the story before, and for that, regardless of its flaws, Gibson's film has fulfilled at least some of its intentions.