If people have got it in for Mel Gibson, he has only himself to blame. The following is going to take me quite some time to write, because between every keystroke, there will be a three-minute pause while I emit a long growl of resentment and rage.
Consider the situation. In 2004, Gibson made a foolish and shallow film about Jesus, which seemed to endorse the Judeophobia of the reactionary Catholicism associated with his father, a notorious Holocaust-denier. Just in case we were in any doubt about his own views, in July last year Gibson got pulled over by a cop for driving under the influence of vino and promptly let rip: “Fucking Jews. Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Are you a Jew?”
After many grovelling apologies, Gibson has now released Apocalypto, his new film, a historical action-adventure set in the 16th-century Mayan civilisation of Central America.
There’s no doubting the film’s power or its throat-grabbing narrative: it has inspired images of jungle warfare and cunning, including the disturbing use of a beehive as a weapon. What other Hollywood mainstreamer would have dreamt of making a movie about Mayan tribespeople in the Mayan language — and betting cash from his own pocket on the venture?
Conventional Hollywood thinking dictates that real money and success is to be made from thinking inside the box, and so it mostly is. But Gibson clearly believes otherwise. It’s interesting to wonder what would have happened if he had somehow kept his authorship of this film secret, and got it entered under a pseudonym at Cannes, in say the critic’s week or director’s fortnight sections. I bet it would be a world-cinema sensation, with critics queueing up to lavish praise on a visionary excursion into an audaciously imagined world, at once decadent and barbaric.
Well, that is not to be. Whatever its box-office success, Apocalypto may not find a chorus of approval. Its crazed mannerisms, its semi-controlled backwash of historical resonance, its melodramatic title, may all count against it. — Â