This page was created on December 2, 2004
This page was last updated on December 2, 2004

It's hard to know what to make of Tim Chey's Impact: The Passion of the Christ. On the surface, it seems to be a documentary about the global impact of Mel Gibson's powerful film about the last hours of Jesus, but we don't have to screen much of Impact to figure out that the film's agenda is lot broader than that, and a lot shallower, too.

The heart of the film is to be found in lengthy sequences about two violent men—one in the United States, and one in Norway—who not only voluntarily confessed to previously unsolved crimes, but who did so as the result of profound conversion experiences. The connection between the two? As director Chey would have us believe, it's the fact that conversion and confession for these men followed screenings of The Passion of the Christ.

Chey's position about the two incidents tells us a lot about his agenda and about his film. There's no denying that Chey has his facts in order; but just as with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Impact's blithe reductionism and leading questions want us to conclude that seeming cause-and-effect translates into incontrovertible proof. That is: if two men, a world apart, can both have their lives so profoundly affected after seeing Gibson's movie, then the power of the film is undeniable. By this same logic, only two cases of Jew-baiting following screenings of The Passion would just as conclusively prove that it fuels anti-Semitism. And I seriously doubt that such a bandwagon would be one on which Chey or his own collection of talking heads would jump, even if such facts could be marshalled. Such selective "support" for one's contentions just doesn't demonstrate good thinking, whether it comes from the right or the left.

Yet Impact does us the service of pointing out a remarkable truth: that faith, not film, has the power to change lives. The conversion experiences studied by Impact seem genuine enough, and are of a type easily correlatable in hundreds of contexts divorced from Mel Gibson or Hollywood. And the stories Chey presents are not ones we're likely to see covered on the nightly news—which is too bad.

At the same time, the sequences highlight the primary weakness of the film: dozens of anecdotes only marginally connected to The Passion of the Christ, and precious little analysis of the actual movie. We visit a Jesus rally in London, for instance, at which a man says, yes, of course, he saw Gibson's movie and found it powerful.

So what? The same would be true at just about any Christian rally in just about any corner of the world right now, and Chey's tenuous connection between the two demonstrates nothing meaningful about the relation of The Passion and developments in world religion. Does the fact that Rachel Scott's parents loved The Passion warrant dragging surveillance footage of the carnage at Columbine (not to mention police file tapes of the killers) into a discussion about Gibson's film? I don't think so. But like Michael Moore, Chey sees his work not as a documentary, per se, but as "commentary." So apparently Chey, like the more experienced and sometimes entertaining filmmaker whose style he mimics, one-ups the chutzpah of Bowling for Columbine. In my book, that's not necessarily a recommendation.

To be fair, it does seem that Chey is content with instigating discussion, and does not presume that he's capable of nailing down answers. He presents enough conflicting ideas, for instance, about the role that Hollywood has played in bringing movies like Natural Born Killers, Kill Bill and The Passion of the Christ to the screen that just about all sides of the culture debate will find fodder for their arguments.

But Chey's commentary is most effective—and affecting—when dealing with the impact of real human issues like contrition, repentance and regeneration, not when Impact relentlessly (and rather haltingly) documents evangelistic sideshows and opening-day queues. There's something to learn here, but the lesson really has little to do with Gibson's Passion.

Or does it?

"Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? ... And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." (I Corinthians 6:9-11)

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