If people have got it in for Mel Gibson, he has only himself to blame. His behaviour has been repulsive. Everyone is prejudiced against his films. I am prejudiced against his films. So the sentence following this is going to take me quite some time to write, because between every keystroke, there will be a three-minute pause while I clench my fists up to my temples and emit a long growl of resentment and rage.
Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is pathologically brilliant. It is bizarre, stomach-turningly violent and frequently inspired.
Consider the situation. In 2004, Gibson made a very foolish and shallow film about Jesus, which seemed chillingly to endorse the Judeophobia of that traditional, 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 with the veritas: "Fucking Jews. Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Are you a Jew?"
After many grovelling apologies, Gibson has now released this, his new film, a historical action-adventure set in the 16th-century Mayan civilisation of South and Central America, featuring tribesmen with bones through their noses, speaking Mayan dialect with subtitles. It has a spectacular human sacrifice scene, in which slaves are led in a veritable production line up the side of a gigantic pyramid, surrounded by crowds; they are butchered at the apex by holy men, to the accompaniment of sinister didgeridoo-type humming, then pushed down the slope to hysterical cheers. A young tribesman escapes slaughter but stumbles upon a racecourse-sized killing field for those who have not been so lucky. It is full of naked corpses.
Like the rest of the film, the scene is brilliant for its sheer delirious excess, its brash, old-fashioned storytelling, and brash, new-fashioned violence. And those naked corpses. What was Gibson thinking? Did he realise what he was doing? Did he realise what images and ideas he was invoking? Well, the director is certainly inviting us to sympathise with the captured and enslaved wretches, so it could be that this is the nearest he will ever come to some form of cinematically constituted apology. And how about the link between this bizarre human sacrifice and Christianity itself? Does Gibson mean us to see it? Does he see it himself?
I have no idea. But the film radiates a kind of electric, shamanic craziness. From the first scene, showing a tapir being brutally killed and eaten, right up to the fantastic denouement, Apocalypto never lets up: a riveting tale of proud tribesmen being captured by a brutally efficient slavemaster attack-squad, then tied up and led to the capital: fresh meat for the 24/7 human sacrifice operation with its continuous waterfall of blood, maintained by a desperate oligarchy in order to propitiate the angry gods who are spoiling their crops.
It almost puts Mel Gibson into a kind of insane-genius league, not too far from the adventures of Werner Herzog. But it wasn't for hours after I had staggered dumbly out of the cinema that I realised which German director Gibson really was channelling - and again, this is hardly going to recommend his film to anyone. Apocalypto is like something by Leni Riefenstahl, both from her Nazi period (the prehistoric Mayan Nuremberg, the mad, declamatory leader) and from her later, primitivist-anthropological period of photographing Sudanese tribesmen.
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 it 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. My view is that for all the director's personal obnoxiousness, the truth is that his mad and virile film makes everything else around look pretty feeble. This is an extraordinary cinematic journey upriver: a worryingly potent Mr Kurtz is sitting in the director's chair.