Dawn rush as passion of Christ hits cinemas

It may be subtitled, and it may be staggeringly gory, yet Christians across the United States also expect that seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ will be a profoundly moving experience.

So much so that some were willing to rise before dawn today – Ash Wednesday on the traditional Christian calendar – to catch the film on its opening day before many people had finished breakfast.

That included 6,000 people who planned to fill all 20 auditoriums at a Cinemark theatre in the Dallas suburb of Plano.

“It is rated R for reality,” the Rev Jack Graham, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said of Gibson’s gruesome portrayal of Jesus’s torture and crucifixion.

Arch Bonnema, a financial planner and member of the church where Graham is pastor – Prestonwood Baptist – reserved the entire Cinemark Tinseltown 20 theatre in Plano.

“When you see the sacrifice that Jesus made, it makes you feel like, I have to do something better with my life,” said Bonnema, 50, a lifelong Christian inspired to act after seeing a special screening of the movie.

The Passion officially opens today in more than 2,800 theatres in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Funded and directed by Gibson, the film has received decidedly mixed reviews from critics. Some have praised Gibson’s total commitment to his subject: The Oscar-winning filmmaker says the movie is both an attempt to faithfully render the Gospels and a personal vision.

Others see it as excessively bloody, obsessed with cruelty and unfair in its portrayal of Jews.

Early reviews have bounced between extremes.

One-time altar boy Roger Ebert of the Chicago-Sun Times expressed respect for Gibson’s vision and astonishment at the level of violence, while David Denby of The New Yorkers saw “a sickening death trip” that is worsened by “some serious mischief” regarding Jews.

Imaginative additions to the Bible’s spare version of events, showing Jewish guards as remarkably brutal and the high priests as cold-blooded, remain intact in the film’s final version, along with the portrayal of Pontius Pilate as a reluctant executioner. These aspects are bound to perpetuate the ongoing outrage from Jewish organisations.

Anticipating such reactions, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations sent members a video to warn against anti-Semitism the movie might foster, and the possible negative psychological impact on any Jews who view it.

Without ever mentioning the film, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a 112-page booklet with texts of church teachings on relations with Judaism - and warnings about portrayals of the passion and New Testament interpretation.

Whatever the critical and official religious verdicts on the film, it seems bound to be a money-maker.

Gibson spent €22m of his own on The Passion, which he produced, directed and co-wrote, and has benefited from a skilled marketing campaign and months of word-of-mouth buzz as the film has been screened for private, often conservative Christian audiences.

“It is gory. It’s a bloody mess,” the Rev Michael Catt said after a preview in Albany, Georgia, hosted by his Baptist church. “But the greatest message is that he bore our sins on the cross so that we could have forgiveness.”

In Sydney, where Gibson grew up, a Jewish leader said the director’s The Passion will not foster interfaith harmony, but predicted most viewers would storm out of because of its “unremitting” violence.

Reviewing the film for Sydney’s Jewish community, Rabbi Raymond Apple criticised Gibson’s portrayal of Jews and questioned how Gibson “wove his way through the internal contradictions of the Gospels in order to present what he sees as the definitive version of the story”.

“It will not destroy all the sincere efforts for interfaith harmony – but it may make them a little harder,” Apple wrote.

“But fortunately, most people are likely to give up on the film because of the level of violence, and this will insulate us from too serious consequences,” he said.