Who'll Bear the Cross?
Hollywood's Jews hunker down
Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles
DIRECTOR, SCREENWRITER and novelist Michael Tolkin says he and his wife recently resumed playing a game they used to employ during periods of incipient paranoia. They ask themselves, "Who in our neighborhood would be a Righteous Gentile? Who would we hide our children with," if and when anti-Semitic push were to come to apocalyptic shove in America?
The impetus for this latest bout of wry morbidness was the late-February release of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Tolkin, 53, is no stranger to the passions unleashed by fervent devotion to Christian tenets. His 1991 tour de force, "The Rapture," which he wrote and directed, was perhaps the first feature ever to treat the Revelations-inspired End of Days scenario in a literalist yet contemporary manner, complete with the Four Horsemen barreling down the highway and Gabriel tooting his horn as prison bars fall away. It may also be the only such film to deal with its Evangelical characters not as charlatans or boobs but with sensitivity and respect.
Though Tolkin says that Gibson's consideration of the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus may not be intentionally anti-Semitic, it does strike him as problematic.
"People are not automatons," he told The Jerusalem Report, "and if the film puts too much of the blame on (Jewish high priest) Caiaphas and not enough on (Roman governor) Pilate, it doesn't mean everyone who sees it is then going to be convinced of the blood libel. I've been watching 'Birth of a Nation' for years and I still haven't joined the KKK. But kids don't reason very well and I don't think it's dandy if Jewish children grow up with the 'Passion' DVD in the house."
Tolkin sees reasons not to get hysterical, pointing out that "the reviews are mostly negative, and it sounds like the brutality is going to put off a lot of people. Let's see what the ministers who are telling parents to bring their kids say when the parents complain to them about nightmares. A month after release, take a poll of 12-year-olds who've seen the film and see what they think. Then we'll know if it's time to pack up and hope the sea parts."
TOLKIN IS NOT alone in his guarded trepidation - just in his willingness to express it publicly. Donna Bojarsky, a public policy consultant with many Jews in the entertainment industry as clients, says that they are "concerned and wary." But they were also sufficiently respectful of the creative process, she told The Report, to withhold judgment until they could see the film for themselves. Doing so was no mean feat in the weeks leading up to "The Passion's" February 25 release - Gibson had imposed a Hollywood version of "selection," barring most Jewish leaders, pundits and other perceived infidels from early screenings, while inviting thousands of presumably sympathetic opinion-makers and church leaders to view the film.
Immediately after the film opened, however, rumblings began to be felt throughout Hollywood, with the expressed consternation of such key Jewish players as Haim Saban and David Geffen finding its way into press reports.
Underlying the reluctance to strike out overtly at Gibson, however, is an overriding financial imperative. "I have not seen it, and probably won't. But I don't think it would serve me well to comment on it," one A-list screenwriter confided to The Report. He aspired, in fact, he said, to preserve an open bridge with Gibson.
"I don't think there's any doubt that even in this instance, Mammon rules," says Ivor Davis, a longtime entertainment columnist for the Los Angeles Times and New York Times syndicates. "The heavyweights I have spoken to have said that the film will make a lot of money," Davis told The Report before the opening, "that it will not destroy Gibson's career, and that Jewish producers will not back away from hiring him in the future."
Indeed, "The Passion of the Christ" generated a near-record $ 117.5 million in its first five days after release, on over 3,000 screens nationwide. This is considered a stunning premiere for an independent film with no name stars, not to mention one with subtitles for dialogue in Latin and Aramaic.
Screenwriter Michael Tolkin says he accepts that American Evangelicals and other Christians do not appear to be overly invested in Christological anti-Semitism (this despite polls that indicate that one quarter of professed Christians in the U.S. support the charge of deicide against the Jews). But while he can't say how the film will play, if at all, in the Muslim world, he expresses the concern that Islamic clerics and anti-Zionists may conceivably use it as yet another vehicle, on a par with the Egyptian-produced TV series, "Horseman Without a Horse," itself partly based on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," with which to pummel Jews and Israel.
Tellingly, says Ivor Davis, James Caviezel, the young Catholic actor who portrays Christ in Gibson's film, has said that neither he nor Gibson is overly concerned about possible violent fallout either in the U.S. or abroad. If the film sparks a pogrom or, more likely, undermines four decades of interfaith rapprochement, Gibson, Davis says, "will say I put my film out there, and if something happens, so be it. Jim Caviezel said as much - that we're not responsible."
"Unfortunately," Davis concludes, "we are in a time of heightened anti-Semitism, especially in Europe. This kind of film can push things over the edge in certain communities. If the film triggers demonstrations or violence, then Mel Gibson should be made to pay in some manner, to carry the burden."
That is one cross, however, Gibson appears unwilling to bear.