Box Office Shepherds

At first glance, you might not think that Mel Gibson and Michael Moore had much in common beyond the fact that they both have Oscars and an M in their first name. Mel the buff pilgrim, Michael the lumpy rebel: Opposite poles of the human spectrum, no? But watch them long enough–and in the past year we have had plenty of opportunity–and it dawns on you that maybe these guys have more in common than one would suppose. They both have a reassuring regular quality. Both seem like guys who maintain a clear channel, albeit from different locations, into that enigmatic, shape-shifting thing, the American mainstream. And if that’s true, maybe it’s not so surprising that they had something else in common this year, something important. Let’s call it a shared intuition. Both of them knew there were enormous reservoirs of feeling out there–yearning, anger, fear–emotions that were not being satisfied by the usual run of movies or network news reports. And both made films, one sacred, one profane, that powerfully tapped into those emotions.

Did we say tapped? What we meant was drilled. The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 pressed deep and hard into some of the most sensitive areas of the American psyche. You could go to any theater where either one was playing and find yourself at some point in a full house of tears, some of them probably your own. And what Gibson and Moore both cared about wasn’t just the easy sentiments that can be summoned up anytime you have Frodo say goodbye to Gandalf. These were filmmakers operating in the very largest realms–the longing for faith, the demand for truth–in a world that can be patronizing to the first and indifferent to the second.

And though only one of them made an explicitly political film, they both produced works that struck major chords in a presidential election year in which faith and truth were in some ways the questions at the very heart of the campaign. How should religious values be expressed in public life? Did the President lie to get support for the war in Iraq? Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, has even said that the ongoing struggle for the definition of America can be described as “Michael Moore vs. Mel Gibson.”

It isn’t quite that simple, of course. Just ask Moore, who says that his film, too, resonates with Christ’s message. The Passion of the Christ emphasized Christ’s final hours and, for the most part, left out scenes of his ministry. “But my film dovetails with the rest of Jesus’ life,” Moore told TIME last week. “It connects to his message about questioning those in authority, of being a man of peace, of loving your neighbor.” And there were people this year who loved both movies–loved Moore’s acrobatic wit and Gibson’s unyielding gravity. And still others who hated both–hated Moore’s penchant for flamboyant speculation and Gibson’s reckless portrayal of the role Jews played in Jesus’ death.

All the same, Gingrich had a point. Even if it weren’t composed entirely of inhabitants of some vast spiritual red zone, the huge audience for The Passion of the Christ was one more sign of the magnitude of the Great American Congregation, the tens of millions of people of faith all across the country, people the Republicans court aggressively and the Democrats woo awkwardly.

As for Fahrenheit 9/11, although red staters went to see the movie and bought the DVD when it came out, strategically, just before the November elections, it was in the blue zone that it became the cultural event of the year. For liberals weary of living in a country full of war whoops from the right, a place where Bill O’Reilly is always puffing out his chest and Ann Coulter snapping her jaws, Fahrenheit 9/11 became the emotional rallying point that the Democratic Party–its convention, its 2004 campaign, even its candidate–never entirely provided. Moore says his film helped bring out millions of Democratic voters. “Had there been no Fahrenheit 9/11,” he says, “and no MoveOn.org no Bruce Springsteen or Jon Stewart–with a war going on, Bush would have won by a landslide.”

Speaking of Springsteen and Stewart, both filmsarrived in a year in which public discourse was, more than ever, conducted by cultural means. In a nation that looks to Stewart and Jay Leno for its news, and in which rap and rock stars worked alongside political operatives to turn out the vote, mere candidates sometimes seemed secondary to the more visible and closely followed celebrity wise guys. It’s that world that Moore now stands astride like an unkempt colossus. There were times last summer and fall when he was a virtual one-man opposition party, the guy who went regularly and brazenly where the Democratic standard bearers feared to tread, the one unafraid to roughhouse with George W. Bush over his family’s links to the Saudis or his slow-motion response on the morning the planes hit the towers.

In fact, one key to the success of Fahrenheit 9/11 was its willingness to humiliate, belittle and demystify a President with a fierceness not seen since, well, Sean Hannity, the Fox News conservative fang barer, last glared in the direction of Bill Clinton. Ferocity, after all, is what incites the passion of the audience. It was one of the things that made The Passion of the Christ as powerful as it was. “I wanted it to be shocking,” Gibson has said. “I wanted it to push the viewer over the edge.” So he made a film distinguished by brutalities so continuous that they threatened to turn the episodes of Christ’s agony into “action beats,” the moments of onscreen adrenaline that screenwriters are taught to provide every few scenes to keep the audience satisfied. But the bloodshed has a point. By forcing the film’s viewers to behold the excruciating particulars of Christ’s suffering, Gibson obliges them to confront what he has called “the enormity of that sacrifice. To see that someone could endure that and still come back with love and forgiveness.”

However fiercely they believed in what they were doing, there were times early on when Gibson and Moore both thought they might be turning out fairly humble products. “A small film” is what Gibson once called his picture. “Another little documentary” is how Moore says he thought of his. It’s understandable. Neither film seemed like box-office gold before it opened. Fahrenheit 9/11 would have graphic footage of Iraqi war casualties and no stars, unless you count the President and Moore himself. The Passion of the Christ was an even longer shot. Not only would it have no big stars but it would have a 9-min. whipping scene and dialogue in Latin and Aramaic. Not exactly a date movie, unless your date is the type who thinks flagellation and subtitles make a movie kind of cool and European.

As it turned out, of course, The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 were very big projects. While ticket sales are not what made them important, their grosses–that perfect word for Hollywood’s most tireless preoccupation–made the world outside Hollywood pay attention to them. By now, The Passion of the Christ has earned more than $370 million in the U.S.–the ninth highest domestic take of all time–plus an additional $240 million abroad. It’s not that cynicism about religion didn’t also continue to sell this year. So did knuckleheaded sensationalism. (You have heard, perhaps, of The Da Vinci Code?) But Gibson recognized that there was an audience, particularly in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, for simple, direct piety, with no trace of irony or insubordination. For Fahrenheit 9/11, the box-office figures are lower but still out of the ballpark for a documentary–$119 million at home, $101 million outside the U.S. That’s enough to make it the 13th highest-grossing film of the year.

As everyone everywhere probably knows, both films benefited hugely from prerelease controversy. Moore saw his film dropped by its distributor, Disney, after Disney’s embattled chief, Michael Eisner, decided he didn’t want his company too closely associated with a picture that went after the President with the gloves off. For three weeks–during which it won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival–Fahrenheit 9/11 was a movie orphan but also, by the end of that time, a much publicized one. And once it opened, Moore was subjected to criticism, and not just from the right, that he had glided over the malign nature of Saddam’s regime to show pictures of kite-flying Iraqi children and that he had clouded the presentation of his claims. For one thing, if you left the theater with the erroneous impression that scores of Saudis flew out of the U.S. in the days right after 9/11, when civil aviation was grounded, you weren’t the only one.

The Passion of the Christ, which was also turned down by the major studios, was surrounded by an even more toxic dispute, about whether it vilified Jews. Certainly the Jews are the film’s heavies, howling for Christ’s blood and led by their high priest, Caiaphas, a sneering villain. But is the film anti-Semitic? Truer to say that it’s guilty in many places of reckless indifference to the impressions it creates.

The controversies are receding now, but the profits are still coming in. Gibson and Moore are like two kings in their countinghouses, figuring out where to go next with the much increased means they have to change the world. Gibson, who has also moved heavily into TV production with the ABC sitcom Complete Savages, the CBS drama Clubhouse and the UPN drama Kevin Hill, has talked about making a film about the rebellion of the Maccabees, the Jewish heroes of the Hanukkah story who defeated the Syrian Greeks and then rededicated the holy temple in Jerusalem. Moore is already at work on Sicko, a documentary about health care in the U.S. “I’m able now to do what I want to do,” he says. “And I don’t need the stamp of approval from a large studio to do it.” And then there’s the prospect of a Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel, another angry romp through the pitfalls of empire and homeland security. “I’m not sure what it will be yet,” Moore says. “We’ll just start gathering film and shooting. We started Fahrenheit 9/11 halfway through Bush’s term. This time we’ll be paying attention from the beginning.”

For all their similarities, in the end what Moore and Gibson produced were films with radically different objectives: Gibson’s was constructed to promote faith, Moore’s to inspire doubt. The Passion of the Christ is the story of a man who submits himself to his fate, who tells God, “Let your will be done.” And by its power the film is effectively an invitation for the viewer to submit as well, to join God’s side in a cosmic battle. “If you believe,” Gibson has said, “you believe that there are big realms of good and evil and they’re slugging it out.” Though he didn’t mean his film to be a recruiting device for any particular political party, its huge success further galvanized evangelical Christian groups at the very time they were pressing forward with their “moral values” agenda.

Fahrenheit 9/11, meanwhile, is the work of a man who sees the present in no less apocalyptic terms. But he thinks of the contending forces not as supernatural but more as bad guys who operate behind a veil of secrecy and illusion. And so Moore made a movie to pierce the veil, one opposed to faith, at least faith in government. Opposed to obedience too. It was a call to arms to resist the course of events set in motion by the disputed first election of George W. And because Moore dropped his film into the middle of campaign season, it also became a novel weapon in that resistance. No one had ever done that before, made a film for theatrical release as a means to influence a U.S. election. As you will have noticed, the election didn’t go the way Moore had hoped. But Moore may have invented a new political tradition: the documentary as campaign spitball. If partisan nonfiction films become a standard feature of American presidential elections in years to come, we will have Moore to thank for that.

There’s one more way in which those men did something similar this year. At a time when the U.S. is engaged in a costly war with no end in sight, they made films that hinged on a simple, easily understood human tragedy: a mother sacrifices her son. But how each regards that sacrifice goes to the essence of the different messages their films convey. Early on in The Passion of the Christ, as she watches her son being led into the temple to be scorned and interrogated, Mary looks into the camera and says, “It has begun. So be it.” Acceptance of what Gibson understands as God’s will is at the heart of the director’s message to a scornful, disobedient world and also the mantra of the religious right.

The mother in Moore’s film is Lila Lipscomb, whose son Michael died in Iraq. Moore presents her at first as a self-described “conservative Democrat,” patriotic and proud of her boy in uniform. But his death leads her to question much that she believes, above all about the war. Late in the film, Lipscomb is confronted by a woman on the street in Washington who first doubts that Lipscomb lost a son in Iraq, then tells her to blame it on al-Qaeda. But the grieving mother doesn’t accept that al-Qaeda was linked to Iraq, and at that point she cries out the words that could be Moore’s working motto: “People think they know, but you don’t know!”

Moore’s working motto? Gibson’s too. For all the things that separated them this year, both directors worked from the same script–to convey the truth, or at least the truth as they see it, to a world in urgent need of it. People think they know, but you don’t know. Who could have imagined there would be so many millions of people ready to hear their pitch? Almost no one–except them.