The Observer Profile: Mel Gibson

There are no laughs in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, an unremittingly gory portrayal of the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus Christ, but a New York Times story about the film published the day after it was released in American last week did raise a smile from the Hollywood cognoscenti. 'New film may harm Gibson's career,' proclaimed the headline.

The thesis ran as follows: Hollywood is a close-knit world in which many of the most powerful players are Jewish. Appalled at the film's allegedly anti-Semitic portrayal of the Jews' role in the death of Christ, these powerful players - said to be David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who own the Dreamworks studio - will no longer countenance working with Gibson, thereby causing irreparable damage to his career.

The notion that any Hollywood executive of any religion would cast aside one of the most successful movie stars of the modern era (in box office terms, at least) over a theological dispute is a novel one. It was certainly far from believable for at least one contributor to the Times 's story. 'If the movie works, I don't think it will hurt him [Gibson],' argued prominent Hollywood agent John Lesher. 'People here will work with the anti-Christ if he'll put butts on seats.'

In which case, the scripts will be piling up behind Mel Gibson's door this coming week.

On the first day of its release, The Passion earned $23.6 million at the box office - impressive enough for any film (the biggest single-day gross in history was Spiderman, with $43m) but an unbelievable figure for a film which is sub-titled, carries an adult-only rating and received more bad reviews than the last Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez offering. By day three, the box-office gross had tipped $48m - almost twice the amount of Gibson's own money that it took to make the film. So much for those, including Gibson himself, who predicted The Passion of The Christ could turn out to be a career-killer.

In such triumphant circumstances, the 48-year-old actor/director/producer could have opted for private satisfaction at confounding expectations, or a public airing of his persecution complex. It came as no surprise to those who have followed Gibson's life, with its bombastic excesses and spiritual absolutism, that he opted for the latter. 'For the last year it's been nothing but nasty editorials and name-calling. Why am I being picked on for this? I don't know of any artist who would have bowed to this kind of pressure. It's un-American,' he told talk-show host Jay Leno last week, adding that the accusations of anti-Semitism were especially hurtful. 'That's not what this film is about. This film is about tolerance.'

One has to take Gibson at his word, but if The Passion of the Christ is indeed about tolerance, then its director has travelled further from his paternal roots than he is currently prepared to admit.

Any discussion on the controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ must start with Hutton Gibson, biblical scholar, father of Mel and, these days, America's most prominent holocaust denier. Now 85 years old, Hutton Gibson is the son of an Australian opera singer who moved to the US. He worked as a railway brakeman until early retirement following an industrial injury. In 1968, when Mel was 12, he moved his family to Australia.

Having returned to the US and living in Summerville, South Carolina, with his second wife Joye, Gibson Snr first came to prominence with the publication of two books attacking the reformist movement in the Roman Catholic church. Rather than stick with the Second Vatican Council of 1962-5, which nudged the church into the twentieth century, Hutton Gibson decided to stay in the sixteenth century, setting up his own reactionary Catholic group which continued to observe the Latin mass and other ancient Catholic traditions.

One of these ancient traditions, at least in more extremist circles, was the vilification of Jews, whose alleged sins began with hastening the death of Christ and continued down through the centuries. In modern times, this obnoxious strand of Catholicism has had few advocates more vocal or more persistent than Hutton Gibson. According to his world view, the Second Vatican Council was a Jewish plot to destroy the Catholic church, the United Nations was a Jewish plot to take over the world and the Holocaust was a Jewish fiction aimed at winning sympathy.

As recently as last month, at precisely the moment his son was most under attack from his critics for his cinematic interpretation of the gospels, Gibson Snr gave a radio interview during which he described Holocaust museums as a 'gimmick to collect money' and suggested that Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve and who happens to be Jewish, should be hanged.

It is important not to attribute these opinions to Mel Gibson, but nevertheless he grew up in a household where they were regularly aired. His career in Hollywood, where he has worked with, and is respected by, many Jews, suggests he declined to follow in his father's anti-Semitic footsteps. Nevertheless, Hutton Gibson did instill in his son a strong religious faith. As every parent knows, this can either bring a child closer to that which is being espoused, or push them away entirely.

In Mel Gibson's case it did both.

In his teens, he actually toyed with becoming a priest. In his twenties, when his career as an actor took off in Australia with the Mad Max series of movies, his life descended into a hedonistic haze, the very antithesis of the church's teachings. 'I'd gotten to a place where I was really involved in the secular Utopia, and I went for it,' he has said.

Salvation came when he was confronted by his wife, Robyn, whom he had married in 1980. She accused him of wasting his talents and, even worse, of being a bad father. Gibson returned to the church with the zealotry of a convert. That was 12 years ago. According to Gibson, everything that happened since was leading him to making his new film. 'This was the film that God wanted me to make.'

With cinema-goers lining up to buy tickets, some of Gibson's more enthusiastic supporters have suggested that it was also the film God wanted to succeed. Maybe it was, though its success has also been the product of what Gibson might describe as 'secular promotion'.

Even those Hollywood observers who have been appalled by the film's contents have been forced to admire the marketing campaign that has accompanied its launch. Beginning last summer, Gibson's production company, Icon, built a buzz both by courting many leading US Christians and by provoking - or at the very least, fuelling - rows with many of the country's most prominent Jews. The hype continued once the film was finished, with screenings for religious leaders and right-wing media figures. Gibson, naturally, denies actively seeking to drum up controversy but if that is the case then he would be the first director in Hollywood history who did not welcome acres of press coverage.

Running parallel to this media campaign was an effort to generate interest among America's 20 million practising Christians, with promotion packs being sent out to church groups urging them to block-book seats to see the film in its first week. In churches across the country, many clergy finished their Sunday sermon with an appeal to get along to the cinema.

The effectiveness of this marketing can be measured by the fact that a film originally aimed at art-house audiences opened on more than 3,000 screens, and is now expected to gross more than $100m. Ironically, the weakest link in Icon's stunningly successful campaign has been Mel Gibson himself.

In a succession of high-profile TV interviews, the director has cut a furious figure, easily flustered and unable to contain his emotions, particularly when confronted about his father's opinion that the Holocaust never happened. Questioned in the US by ABC television's star interviewer, Diane Sawyer, Gibson threatened her: 'Don't go there, Diane.' In another interview he would say only: 'Nothing can drive a wedge between me and my blood. He's my father. I love him.'

Gibson's allies have sought to portray this line of questioning, as well as the criticism of film itself, as the modern-day equivalent of a witchhunt - an interpretation of events which casts Gibson in a new role; as a champion of freedom of speech. An alternative view is that by refusing to denounce his father's views on the Holocaust, Gibson is championing only the most vile expression of free speech.

It is this, rather than the contents of his movie, that Hollywood's powerful elite may never forgive him for. After all, as newspaper columnist and best-selling author, Mitch Albom, wrote last week: 'Gibson said he made this movie because he could no longer deny his faith. Imagine someone denying your existence.'

Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson

DoB: 3 January 1956 (Peekskill, New York)
Wife: Robyn Moore (married on 7 June 1980)
Children: Hannah, Edward, Christian, William, Louis, Milo and Tommy
Parents: Hutton and Ann (who died in 1990)
Earnings: $140m 1992-2002