GIBSON'S 'PASSION' IS DEVASTATING, UPLIFTING.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

The atmosphere inside the movie theater Wednesday night - immediately following ``The Passion of the Christ'' - was unlike any I had seen before. No one was munching popcorn. There was no idle chit-chat. A sullen, stunned crowd stumbled for the exits, faces pale and anguished. Patrons headed toward their homes or some other quiet place to think or pray.

This was no angry mob out to launch a pogrom. Hardly.

It was an audience of ordinary people who, after a year of hearing the accusations and the praise, were finally able to judge Mel Gibson's instant classic for themselves.

As a practicing Catholic and the grandson of Austrian Jews who narrowly escaped the Holocaust in 1938, I have both a yearning for a positive Hollywood portrayal of my faith and a revulsion for anti-Semitism. I bought my ticket in advance, then crammed into that packed theater on Ash Wednesday, curious and suspicious - wondering whether the film would live up to the hype.

It did, and it didn't.

As a production, ``The Passion'' is an artistic masterpiece. It conveys with beauty and agony one of Christianity's greatest paradoxes - that an event so excruciating, so cruel and so wrong could ultimately be so liberating, so generous, so right. That the worst imaginable Friday could forever be known as Good, by the grace of a God whose love for the people he created is as infinite as himself.

Artistically and spiritually, the film is all that supporters said it would be and more. The tender flashbacks of a young Jesus and his mother, the moment Christ prays for his tormentors while hanging on the cross, the converts he wins in his final hours, all bear triumphant testament to the ``no greater love'' of which he preaches.

What's utterly overrated are the two aspects of the film that detractors attacked before they even saw it - the alleged anti-Semitism and the complaints of excessive violence.

Yes, angry Jewish mobs repeatedly and successfully clamor for Jesus' death - just as they do throughout the Gospels. But these are hardly the only Jews we see.

They share the stage with Jesus himself, a Jew whose disciples - also Jews - fittingly call him ``rabbi.'' The story is told largely through the eyes of the Virgin Mary, depicted as a faithful and devoted Jewish mother, who happens to be played by a Jewish actress, Maia Morgenstern. When Christ first goes before the Sanhedrin, two priests step in and denounce the show trial as a ``travesty.''

And along Jesus' journey to Calvary are Jewish mourners, openly grieving and protesting his treatment.

Most notably, there's Gibson's moving, extrabiblical portrayal of Simon of Cyrene, the Jew whom Roman soldiers forced to help Jesus carry his cross. In the movie, Simon is brave and compassionate, ultimately risking his life - while enduring the naked anti-Semitism of Roman soldiers - to come to Christ's defense.

For all the controversy over Gibson's portrayal of the Sanhedrin and the Jewish mob, it's the Romans who come across as the most mean-spirited and sadistic. The centurions take delight in the beatings, the scourging, the crucifixion. They mock Christ and laugh with ghoulish delight when his blood splatters their clothes.

Yet even here, Gibson is careful not to paint with too broad a brush. Pontius Pilate is more a coward than a villain, and his wife, a pagan, somehow senses something divine about Jesus, something blessed about his mother. ``The Passion of the Christ'' portrays Romans and Jews of both good will and ill. It conveys no sense of corporate responsibility for Christ's death, other than the guilt that all humanity shares because of our sinfulness.

Perhaps that's why some of the groups that most loudly suggested that Gibson and ``The Passion'' were anti-Semitic have gradually downgraded those charges. Now they claim that though the film itself is not anti-Semitic, its fans might be. Bigots will misinterpret ``The Passion'' and be emboldened by it, they say.

But bigots will misinterpret anything to support their prejudices - that's what makes them bigots. If all entertainment and art must be sterilized so as to prevent extremists from misinterpreting it, then neither art nor entertainment can ever seriously touch on religion again.

Yet more curious than the charges of anti-Semitism, which stem from a real history of real suffering, is the hand-wringing over Gibson's violent depiction of Christ's final 12 hours. Newsweek describes the film as ``relentlessly savage.'' The New York Times says it ``seems to arise less from love than from wrath.'' The New Yorker calls it ``one the cruelest movies in the history of cinema.''

Yes, ``The Passion of the Christ'' is a violent film, but certainly not more so than, say, ``Reservoir Dogs,'' ``Gangs of New York,'' ``Kill Bill'' or any number of movies that have won the praise of some of the very critics now denouncing Gibson's gore. It contains cruelty, but it's not itself cruel, like, say the wretched and critically acclaimed ``Seven.''

And its violence, while intense, is never gratuitous. Unlike any number of bloody films that have made millions in recent years, the depiction of pain and brutality in ``The Passion'' isn't meant to appeal to our morbid fascinations, but to horrify us with the ugliness and the brutality of the sins we commit every day.

That, I suspect, is the real reason why ``The Passion of the Christ'' has aroused such consternation.

In an age when deriding faith passes for intellectual sophistication, where truth is considered relative and the very notion of sin is dismissed, the film offers an honest, unapologetic portrayal of Christianity. It explicitly documents the evilness of men in this, a culture that often denies the existence of evil. ``The Passion of the Christ'' tramples on all the rules and hypocrisies of political correctness. It says there is a God, and it names him.

And that, for militant secularists, amounts to just plain poor taste.

Gibson has created a work that's both devastating and uplifting, making the abstraction of an infinitely loving God seem tangible in a way that only the big screen can. ``The Passion'' isn't about the Jews or the Romans. Nor is it about guts and gore. It's about each and every one of us, and our role in the greatest love story of all time.

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Photo:

(color) In ``The Passion of the Christ,'' starring Jim Caviezel, second from right, as Jesus, Mel Gibson has crafted a film that tramples on political correctness.

Newmarket Films