Adam's blogbox: in defense of Mel Gibson (hey, you may not agree, but see if I don't at least have a point)

Let me start by mentioning three famous anti-Semites: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Joseph Campbell (star of the “The Power Of Myth” series on PBS with Bill Moyers, and author of “Hero With A Thousand Faces”). Yet no one dismisses their work because of their anti-Semitism, hideous as this is. In fact, many believe they weren’t anti-Semites, despite evidence to the contrary.

Now I don’t know how anti-Semitic Mel Gibson is, or if he is a genuine, actual, real dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite. I do know he apologized profusely for remarks he made when he was drunk (to me, it was far worse of him to drive drunk and endanger others than to mouth off about Semites).

But when I look at Mel Gibson’s work, I look at it like I consider T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. When I read their poems, I think “what a great poet,” not “what a great anti-Semite.” However, when film critics look at Mel Gibson’s work, they appear to be thinking two things: “what a great anti-Semite,” and “what a bad person, because he likes violence.”

Quite frankly, both views have nothing to do with taking an honest look at Mel Gibson’s movies.

Just for starters, Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorcese have both shown us images more sickeningly violent than anything by Mel Gibson, yet no one writes that they’re morally objectionable because they like violence. The images in Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” of Japanese soldier suicides who blew themselves up with handgrenades have got to be the most sickeningly violent images I’ve seen in the movies in my life, but nobody says Clint is a bad guy for showing us such awful-looking, stomach-wrenching stuff.

Yet the violence in Mel Gibson’s movies is used to hammer him over the head as some kind of morally objectionable creature. This is such a patent example of journalists piling it on for no other reason than pandering to their readers and their own prejudices, it’s almost not worth discussing. Except for two reasons.

Number one, it’s an example of how low film journalism in this country has sunk. People who write about movies in the mainstream media have become nothing more than flunkeys for Hollywood, much like political journalists are shills for whatever political party they vote for. Film journalists and critics are more about making sure they maintain access than speaking their minds.

No film critic has to worry about screwing up their access to Hollywood by piling on Mel Gibson, hence the free-for-all. About the best you can say for these critics is that they have the courage of their cowardice. Where are the Pauline Kaels of today? Non-existent.

Most egregiously, this piling-on means that Mel Gibson is not getting a fair shake as a filmmaker. Which is doubly egregious considering that he may be the only true film artist working out of Hollywood today.

“Braveheart” won every prize going, but his two follow-ups, “The Passion of the Christ” and “Apocalypto,” have won zilch, despite the fact that they’re better movies. Despite the fact that they’re the best movies to come out of Hollywood in many a year.

Of course, “The Passion of the Christ” got embroiled in an argument about its supposed anti-Semitism, which is par for the course. One cannot say anything about the Jews in this country without having the likes of Alan Dershowitz, that well-known apologist for torture, and other prominent Jewish controversialists stepping up to the mike. The shabbier the Israelis treat the poor Palestinians, the more vigorous the charge of anti-Semitism against anyone who has the effrontery to criticize Israel. The latest victim of this charge of anti-Semitism is President Carter for his book about Palestine. Here’s a man who actually engineered peace between Israel and Egypt, and thereby did more for Israel than Alan Dershowitz or any other paranoid member of the highly vocal Israel lobby in America, but he gets called an anti-Semite. Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite? What can one say except Jesus H. Christ?

I’m sorry I had to go through all this before I got to Mel Gibson as a moviemaker, but it seems one cannot ignore the baggage that critics bring to looking at his movies.

As an avid filmgoer of over 40 years, let me state some of own prejudices. I think Ingmar Bergman is the best filmmaker ever, and so far ahead of any of his rivals that he belongs in a category of his own. Not only because he’s made the best movies, but because he’s made more of the best movies than any other filmmaker alive or dead. On volume alone, he beats everyone, even if one didn’t take into account that “The Seventh Seal,” “The Silence,” “The Shame”, “Cries And Whispers, “The Virgin Spring,” “Persona” and “Scenes From A Marriage” set a standard that all other filmmakers fall short of.

OK, now you know where I come from -- from a damn serious place. Not for me the niceties of lightweights like Coppola and Scorcese.

That being my prejudice, I want to restate here and now that Mel Gibson is the only interesting and serious film artist working out of Hollywood today, and I say this on the evidence of his last two movies.

For a start, they’re not even in English. There is no other filmmaker with the courage of his vision in Hollywood today who would even attempt such a thing. Clint Eastwood has made a movie in Japanese, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” but heck, it’s playing in Japan where it doesn’t need subtitles, and it’s a very conventional war movie (a really good one, too).

Mel Gibson’s last two movies are anything but conventional. In fact, they’re very un-Hollywood-like, and not only because they’re not in English. They’re un-Hollywood-like because they both come from a very personal place -- from a very singular vision.

Mel Gibson is perhaps the only filmmaker today who is very hung up on the limits and endurance of the human body, a concern he shares with contemporary visual artists, among whom the human body has been a dominating subject since the 1980s. Kiki Smith springs to mind. I can’t think of another Hollywood director I would place in such august company.

Another aspect of Mel Gibson’s singularity of vision is that his movies don’t even look all that Hollywood.

To me, “The Passion of the Christ” plays like an arthouse movie made by an Eastern European director at a time when Russia still ruled Eastern Europe – a Polish movie perhaps. It has the same weird, other-worldly consistence of imagery, a quality both everyday and surreal; that odd take on the world that makes you realize the filmmaker comes from another world, where things are necessarily off-beat; a world of submerged metaphor where our reality is hinted at, because the filmmaker is working under a cloud of censorship.

“The Passion” came from an un-Hollywood-like mind, which may be why so many misunderstood it (not that devout Christians did, they lapped it up). I don’t know what it is about growing up in Australia, but Mel Gibson obviously suffers from a deep un-American ethos, and thank God for that. My suspicion is that Mel grew up in Australia when it still felt itself a colonial second to England, a poor-cousin off-shoot of the British Empire, and that those attitudes infuse his work. In “Braveheart” it’s pretty obvious that he is not going to carry any water for the Brits.

This unconventionality is what made “The Passion” such a fresh and overwhelming experience for so many Christians. No Hollywood sappiness. No sanctified sissy-looking Jesus. It was the film of a man being humiliated by sadistic Romans, and persistently and relentlessly so. It is this very relentlessness of his personal vision that makes Mel Gibson so interesting, and that makes him tower above his contemporaries. Kevin Costner has made one of the best westerns ever in “Open Range,” but he lacks Gibson’s relentlessness of personal vision, and is therefore not quite as interesting. The other good actor/director, Clint Eastwood, makes conventional and worthy middlebrow fare, so he is also of less interest.

“The Passion” also happens to exemplify film-making of bravura extremities. Mel Gibson knows how to create compelling images, and he knows how to make them flow over you like a home-made tsunami. He can also conjure up unbearably moving moments. Offhand, I can think of two such moments in “The Passion” – when Mary cleans up the blood left by her son where the Romans beat him, and when a tear/raindrop falls from heaven, which the camera follows down in a special effect that’s actually special.

I loved “The Passion,” and I’m neither Christian nor Jewish. I couldn’t see the anti-Semitism, unless I think of the whole of the Christ story or Christianity itself as anti-Semitic, which may be a valid point, but is not a valid critique of the movie. There would be no such charge against the movie if America wasn’t full of touchy Jews ever ready to leap to the defense of Israel against justified and unjustified attacks. They should really begin to see the difference between a critique of Israel – which Israel richly deserves -- and actual anti-Semitism, which is a hideous thing that nobody deserves.

Now for “Apocalypto,” which I think is an even better movie than “The Passion,” because it approaches its subject with a wider sweep and a truly epic sensibility.

I will not quote any of the laughable comments about Gibson’s love of violence, comments which might as well be directed at any other Hollywood director, from Eastwood to Scorcese to Coppola to Arthur Penn to god knows who else. Violence is standard currency in Hollywood, and to single out Gibson for his love of violence is simply ridiculous.

I will however, quote a capsule review from The Onion, whose critics I find to be far above the average, and easily the most useful to a filmgoer, because they let you know if a movie is worth seeing, and their taste is just about flawless. You can actually trust a review by The Onion, like you can trust a review from Variety, whereas you cannot trust a review from any other source. You cannot, for example, trust a review from The New York Times, even though they have some very smart reviewers. The New York Times being my local paper, I’ve had more bum steers from them than I care to think of.

Here’s what The Onion says about “Apocalypto”: “Scrape off all the arthouse pretensions and modern-politics metaphors in Gibson’s follow-up to The Passion of the Christ, and it’s essentially an action film – a sophisticated genre outing, but still a standard one-against-many shoot-‘em-up, with spears and obsidian daggers in place of spaghetti-Western guns. With you-are-there immediacy, Gibson tells the story of a young Mayan warrior who tries to fend off manhunters and protect his family.”

This was probably the kindest review Gibson’s movie got, and it’s essentially a good pointer to The Onion’s hip audience. Expect a sophisticated action movie, it says, which is one thing “Apocalypto” undoubtedly is.

At the same time, it generously mentions “arthouse pretensions” and “modern-politics metaphors”, but asks us to scrape them away.

This is where I take issue. “Arthouse” and “modern-politics metaphors” are what this movie is about. Yes, it’s an action movie, and perhaps the greatest action movie since George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (called The Road Warrior in the US), which happened to star Mel Gibson, which would make “Apocalypto” the second best action movie ever made.

“Apocalypto” is a very unique movie, because not only is it a Mayan action movie in the Mayan language, it’s also an artistic and political movie. In other words, it should be uniting audiences who like action movies, art movies and political movies, if only audiences knew that. If only film critics told them that.

But they didn’t. They didn’t, for example, tell anyone that the journey of the captive slaves from the forest to the inner plaza of the Mayan city is one of the most breath-taking sequences in world cinema. Without any dialogue, one enters the city of the Mayans, and goes through various sectors of its society – the slums, the factories, the market, the bourgeoisie, the decadent rich – in an almost anthropologically exacting analysis, compounded by unbelievable images. I was reminded of Fellini in his most surreal Satyricon mode.

The film critics didn’t, for example, tell anyone that the movie gives you a detailed picture of a crumbling, religiously hysterical civilization, a metaphor for our own America today. Perhaps the best political comment of any movie on our current political sickness.

“Apocalypto” is a great action movie, one of the best ever. It’s also a great art movie, and a great political movie. That’s three greats in one. It’s a movie unlike any other, deep and rich and compelling, in which the director displays an ambition ranging higher than any other contemporary moviemaker’s.

“Apocalypto” has an elemental, mythic quality about it. There is an amazing scene in which a child, pushed back because she has the plague, delivers a prophecy of doom like some Delphic oracle out of a Greek myth. It’s the kind of thing one would not expect from Gibson: he doesn’t comes across as particularly well-read, intellectual, or artistic, but there you go, his movie delivers artistically and intellectually.

It took about twenty years before anyone realized how great a movie Brian De Palma’s Scarface was, and maybe it’s going to take maybe another ten years before people realize how great “The Passion” and “Apocalypto” are. Meanwhile, Mel Gibson is going to make plenty more movies. If he keeps going the way he’s going, there’s no telling what he’ll bring us. I can’t wait for the nest one. Can he possibly top himself? Even if he doesn’t ever make another movie, three out of the four he has made – Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto -- make him the #1 moviemaker in Hollywood today.