Silence

Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: Jay Cocks & Martin Scorsese (based on the novel by Shûsaku Endô)
Stars: Andrew Garfield (Rodrigues), Adam Driver (Garupe), Liam Neeson (Ferreira), Tadanobu Asano (Interpreter), Ciarán Hinds (Father Valignano), Issei Ogata (Old Samurai / Inoue), Shin’ya Tsukamoto (Mokich), Yoshi Oida (Ichizo), Yôsuke Kubozuka (Kichijiro), Kaoru Endô (Unzen Samurai)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2016
Country: U.S. / Mexico / Taiwan
Silence
Silence

Martin Scorsese’s Silence, his long-simmering adaptation of Shûsaku Endô’s 1966 novel about the persecution of European Christian missionaries and their converts in 17th-century feudal Japan, is a powerful, at times deeply unsettling, but always evocative depiction of the violence inherent in the intersection of religion and nationalism and the conflicted nature of faith in even the most devout believers. Scorsese had wanted to adapt Endô’s novel since the early 1990s, right after he made the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which, despite its many hysterical detractors, remains one of the greatest and most meaningful depictions of Christ’s sacrifice ever committed to film. His interest in faith and religion goes back to his own Catholic upbringing and initial interest in the priesthood, and it has informed most of his films, whether they be about gangsters, or Wall Street tycoons, or ambulance drivers.

Most of the film is set on the island nation of Japan, which in the 1600s was largely isolated from the rest of the world. Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (The Wolf of Wall Street, Argo) convey this isolation through an intensity of environment, with black sand beaches, craggy cliffs, and verdant green hills that are often shrouded in mist and rain, making them simultaneously beautiful and threatening, mysterious and unsettling. The primary characters are two young Portuguese priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver), who convince their supervisor, Father Valignano (Ciarán Hinds), to send them to Japan to search for their mentor, a priest named Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who had spent years doing missionary work in Japan, but is rumored to have committed apostasy and integrated into Japanese culture. Rodrigues and Garupe know that they are entering a world of immense danger, as the Tokugawa shogunate had banned Christianity and was actively persecuting Japanese Christians through intimidation and violence. But, they are determined—perhaps a bit overly idealistic and in love with the idea of their own martyrdom—and they persist in going.

What they find in Japan is an endless stream of persecution, particularly of poor Japanese villagers who have converted to Christianity. The persecution is led by an Inquisitor named Inoue (Issei Ogata), who has learned through experience that just torturing and killing Christians is not enough to enforce the ban on their religion. Instead, he has determined that a much more effective means of control is forcing them and their priests to commit apostasy in a public forum, thus humiliating their faith in front of others and undermining the foundation of belief. It is a particularly cruel practice, and one that is backed by plenty of physical torment—which includes being hung upside down and bled, strapped to crosses in the rising ocean tides, and burned alive—all of which the Japanese believers endure. Rodrigues and Garupe, as missionaries from the outside world, are often protected by their converts, sent to hide in the hills while they suffer for their beliefs, which often makes them (like us) witnesses to the persecution, rather than direct sufferers. This is just one strand of conflict snaking through the film’s narrative, as Rodrigues in particular grapples with his own culpability in his converts’ suffering and faith in a God who seems to be silent in the face of all this violence.

Garfield, as he did earlier this year in Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, gives a tremendous performance in playing a character whose very core is constantly under attack. His strength of self and his intense faith is slowly chipped away, and part of the film’s tragedy lies in his gradual breakdown. At the same time, though, he is not a conventional “saint” figure, as his own, often unstated, sense of glory in martyrdom threatens to undermine the true nature of his goals. He is pitted against Inoue, who is in many ways Rodrigues’s opposite. Whereas Rodrigues’s faith compels him to act in ways that seem to go against his own self-interest, Inoue is a rigid pragmatist. The very idea of committing apostasy by stepping on a fumi-e, a crude plaque of Jesus, is a pragmatic one, and he can’t understand the stubbornness of those who refuse to do it to save themselves or others. As he says at one point, he doesn’t really care what anyone believes, as long as they publicly denounce that which the government has banned. Unfortunately, Inoue is one of the film’s weaker elements, as he fits too neatly into a long line of shifty, feminized Asian caricatures dating back to the “Yellow Peril” scares of the 1920s. With his smiling overbite, lisping voice, and physical fragility, his spiritual corruption takes on both physical and racialized traits, which gives some of his scenes an uneasy sense of racial degradation.

Suffering is a constant in Scorsese’s oeuvre, and in Silence, like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun (1997), his epic portrait of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, he finds a uniquely compelling vehicle for its exploration. Unlike so many recent “Christian films” like Fireproof (2008) and God Is Not Dead (2014) that have struck a chord with their audience, Silence is not intended to trade in simple reassurance; its goal is not to send Christians out of the theater feeling empowered in their beliefs and supported in their views about the misguidedness of others. Rather, it forces those of us who call ourselves Christians to look inward, to weigh our own sense of conviction and faith and recognize that following Christ is not a simple, feel-good endeavor that offers the promises of comfort and riches (as many so-called “prosperity gospel” preachers would have you believe). It is, rather, a constant struggle of reconciliation between fallen humanity and the divine, which by its very nature is beyond our understanding. Thus, the film’s theme of an all-powerful God that chooses to suffer along with his followers takes on a special and powerful force, conveying in sometimes brutal, but ultimately edifying, terms what it really means to have faith.

Silence Blu-ray

Aspect Ratio2.40:1
Audio
  • English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround
  • French Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
  • Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
  • SubtitlesEnglish, French, Spanisn
    Supplements
  • Martin Scorsese’s Journey Into Silence featurette
  • DistributorParamount Home Entertainment
    SRP$39.99
    Release DateMarch 28, 2017

    COMMENTS
    It was unfortunate that Silence was not met with the critical and commercial attention it deserved during its brief theatrical run, although Rodrigo Prieto’s outstanding cinematography was nominated for an Oscar, which it really should have won. You can judge for yourself with Paramount’s beautiful new 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation, which brings out all the supple details and bold colors in Prieto’s work. The film is a sublime visual experience, with the intense environment of black sand beaches, craggy cliffs, swelling ocean waters, and verdant green hills taking on a life of its own. The transfer manages the film’s visual palette with great dexterity and detail, and the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1-channel surround soundtrack sounds fantastic, with great depth and nuance. The only supplement on the disc is a 24-minute featurette titled “Martin Scorsese’s Journey Into Silence.” As the title suggests, it looks at the evolution and grueling, but highly rewarding production of this passion project of Scorsese’s, which he had been trying to get off the ground since the early 1990s. It includes lots of the behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with Scorsese, co-writer Jay Cocks, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, actors Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, and Issei Ogata, UCLA professor of history Katsuya Hirano, and consultant Father James Martin.

    Copyright © 2017 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © Paramount Home Entertainment

    Overall Rating: (3.5)




    James Kendrick

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