Apocalypto now

Mel Gibson leads actors portraying Holcane warriors across a river during the filming of Apocalypto. (Andrew Cooper/Buena Vista Pictures)

Mel Gibson has some rage issues. To confirm this thesis, there’s no need to search the internet for reports of his recent DUI ranting; just go to your local multiplex where his latest hyper-violent outburst is running full-length under the title Apocalypto. As a writer-director, Gibson seems to be creating his own genre: “Historigore,” period pictures soaked in bits of flesh and torrents of blood.

Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and now Apocalypto call into question the (liberal? Maybe to Mel) assumption that our culture is violent. Look backward, says Gibson; it turns out we’re a bunch of daisy-chaining pansy asses in comparison. He’s a bullying director, a giddy bringer of on-screen violence so over the top, so gag inducing, so extreme that his movies feel like fists-clenched schoolyard challenges. Anyone who can’t take the spatter isn’t welcome at the crucifixion. It would be easy to write him off as an angry former action star spitting in the face of his rabid audience: “You want violence? You want thrills? You got it.” And yet, Gibson has a gift for tension and spectacle that’s rare. He’s a wicked entertainer, but a hateful one.

So where to go after torturing Scottish rebels and snuffing Christ? Gibson has found a society where bloodlust is institutionalized, where a man can say: “I am going to peel his body and wear his skin,” and you think: “Well, it is Tuesday.”

Apocalypto is set in Mexico around the time of Columbus, just as the great Mayan civilization is collapsing. The film is one long hunt, and it opens accordingly: a group of men from the village are chasing a tapir, which they finally catch with a spiked contraption that fillets it on the spot. The hunters, including a beautiful young father named Jaguar Paw (the wonderfully expressive Rudy Youngblood), make Borat-style “sexy time” jokes and dance the night away with their women.

The rainforest village is Edenic for only a moment — Mel doesn’t do bucolic — when brutal warriors seeking humans for slavery and sacrifice arrive to provoke the fall. They hack the women to death and leave the children wailing alone. Gibson is a lingerer, and each lobbed limb warrants the scrutiny of a nature documentary capturing the blooming of a flower. Within the first five minutes of the movie, someone eats a testicle. At the time, this graphic display was shocking and repulsive (Gibson employs very able FX people), but somewhere after the heart chewing and around the second beheading, I longed for the halcyon days of the testicle appetizer. We were so young then.

Religious leaders prepare for a Mayan ceremony. (Andrew Cooper/Buena Vista Pictures)

And yet, for all its stomach churning excess, Apocalypto is a feat of filmmaking. The recreation of a living, seething Mayan city is astonishing: a rippling sea of Mayas in spectacular head- (and teeth-) dresses jump up and down in delirium as priests serve humans to the gods, bowling heads down the steps of a great pyramid. It is a scene to rival the great old school epics like Ben Hur and Cleopatra, albeit as imagined by an asexual Bob Guccione.

Jaguar Paw and his fellow villagers are flagellated and led to the city with their arms attached to a long branch overhead; a travelling line of crucifixions in a film rife with Catholic imagery. But at the top of the pyramid, his head ready to roll, Jaguar Paw fights back, and he has an oracle and an eclipse on his side. He flees to the forest toward his wife (Dalia Hernandez) and child, who are hidden in a deep hole back in the village. A gang of Mad Max-ish warriors make chase, and the manhunt, backed by James Horner’s tense music, is exciting, visceral and pointless.

Is there an allegory in Apocalypto, or is it just gory? The idea of civilization collapsing on itself has more than a little relevance these days, as does the transitory nature of belief and ritual. Early on, before the carnage, by the light of the fire, a village elder says: “When a tree falls, a star falls. When the forest is gone, we will all be gone.” A popular theory holds that the Mayan civilization collapsed due to climate change, and in Apocalypto, the human sacrifices are a plea with the gods to end a drought. Perhaps Gibson is hoping for an ironic Inconvenient Truth moment when Jaguar Paw shouts (in the little-used Yucatec Maya dialect that is the film’s tongue): “This is my forest! My father hunted this forest, I hunt this forest, and my son will hunt this forest after me!”

But I don’t believe Apocalypto is a paean to the environmentalists: Gibson is far too busy tearing hearts out of chests to follow through with any of the ideas that flutter at the edges of the bloodshed. As a director, Gibson is a brute. There is no love in the way he shoots the rainforest; he does not care to linger on the sunlight through the trees. What Jaguar Paw adores about his life we barely see. Apocalypto, for all its visual power, is hardly elegiac; it’s not the beauty that turns Gibson on, it’s the slaughter.

What a strange career for People magazine’s former Sexiest Man Alive. It’s always a good idea to separate an artist’s life from his work, but Gibson’s films are so intensely personal — he writes, directs and funds them himself — that there doesn’t seem to be any separation. His very Catholic obsession with the body and its mortification smothers his stories, and his anger and inability to find peace (“What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?”), seems to be crippling his work. Every shredded organ is a wasted moment where he could have slowed down and trusted viewers to imagine the horror, rather than thrust it upon them so bitterly. If Apocalypto tells us very little about ourselves, it says far too much about Mel Gibson’s demons, the ones he should exorcize in a therapist’s office, not on screen.

Apocalypto opens Dec. 8.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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