Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Apocalypto
Now
(Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, 12/11/06)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It
seems that nobody is afraid to cast the first stone when it comes to
condemning Mel Gibson. To my mind, the crude anti-semitism many saw
in Passion of the Christ is regrettable, but hardly worse than
the sub rosa Jew-baiting in, say, The Phantom Menace,
with its hook-nosed, money-grubbing, vaguely Semitic-sounding alien
slave-traders. What is beyond a doubt, though, is that Gibson's recent
drunken anti-semitic rant during a traffic stop was the public relations
equivalent of scourging himself with a barbed flail. It almost seems
calculated to test if his career can rise from the dead. Good friends
continue to assure me that they won't patronize a Gibson film even if
it ranks with Citizen Kane.
That's a shame. For Apocalypto
(a.k.a. "Mel Gibson's Mayan movie") is a unique, mostly entertaining,
occasionally quite compelling spectacle. The title, from a Greek word
meaning "the uncovering," is in this case literally true,
since the movie represents the first time a whole civilization has been
given the big screen treatment. As almost everybody knows, it follows
Passion of the Christ in being presented in an authentic language—in
this case, in the Yucatec tongue of southern Mexico (with English subtitles).
It trumps the gamble Gibson took in Passion, however, because
its cast includes not only no stars, but not a single recognizable actor.
What comes as the biggest surprise,
however, is that all this conspicuous authenticity is put in the service
of a story almost elemental in its simplicity. In a phrase, Apocalypto
may be the most elaborate excuse for a chase flick ever conceived.
The tale is set at the twilight
of the Mayan age, when the cities of Mesoamerica were caught in a downward
spiral of warfare, plague, and environmental devastation. Jaguar Paw
(Rudy Youngblood) is resident of a small outlying village that is raided
by the warriors from a nearby city. The purpose of the attack, however,
is not thrillseeking or loot, but the taking of live captives for sacrifice
in the city temple. With his wife and son safe but trapped in a well
back at the village, Jaguar Paw refuses to go quietly. The ensuing foot-race
against his enemies occupies something like a third of the film's total
running time.
The movie is nothing if not a visceral
kick. In Gibson's hands, the pursuit on foot hurtles like a high speed
car chase. (Car chases, after all, are made in the cutting room, not
the streets). The aesthetic of excess epitomized by Passion is
paralleled here by the film's unrelenting pace—and the graphic
chest-crackings and decapitations dedicated to the gods. Anyone who
presents us with a point-of-view shot through the eyes of a severed
head is clearly not afraid to throw the kitchen sink. If we are
being honest, we have to grant that Gibson's epic more than matches
the kinetic thrill of Michael Mann's much-praised Last of the Mohicans.
Yet the film clearly has something
more significant on its mind. It opens with a quote from America's own
middle-brow Thucydides, Will Durant: "A great civilization is not
conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
The script (penned by Gibson and Farhad Safinia) was reportedly informed
by Gibson's reading of the Popul Vuh, a surviving account of
the creation and foundational myths of the post-classic Maya. The visualization
of the Mayan capital is bizarrely fascinating—a whitewashed cityscape
of obsidian tools, pierced anatomies, and eight foot-wide feather headdresses,
like a pre-gunpowder Blade Runner—or maybe closing day at
the Burning Man Festival. Gibson clearly wants to make a parallel between
the Mayan decline and our own "post-classic" condition.
Be that as it may, Apocalypto
is likely to draw its own share of controversy. Though human sacrifice
along the lines portrayed here—and practices even more unsettling,
such as child-sacrifice and the wearing of victims' skins—is copiously
documented in ancient Mesoamerica, some well-intentioned souls will
inevitably fret that this will be exploited to excuse the historic injustices
done to native people. True, at one key point (which I won't divulge
here) Gibson does seem to confuse the Maya (who flourished between the
3rd and 9th centuries AD) and the later Aztecs (who encountered the
Spanish in the 16th century). How the legacies of native cultures are
served by bowdlerizing them, however, is beyond this writer's understanding.
Where Mel Gibson's sins rank on
the moral scale of directorial impropriety—from Woody Allen's spousal
betrayal with his adopted daughter, to Roman Polanski's statutory rape
and flight from prosecution, to Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl's
collaboration with genocidal regimes—is a matter of opinion. At
a minimum, Gibson should be applauded for taking audiences to a place
they've never been before, and doing so vividly.
©2006 Nicholas Nicastro
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