Your assessment of this daunting 161-minute
movie about Christian imperialism in feudal Japan rather depends on your
religious affiliation. (Review by Patrick Compton - 7/10)
Your assessment of this daunting 161-minute
movie about Christian imperialism in feudal Japan rather depends on your
religious affiliation.
As a secularist, I was inclined to feel
that the two Portuguese Jesuit priests attempting to spread the gospel in the
land of the rising sun would have done better to have stayed at home.
Practising Christians might disagree although the film’s scriptwriter and
director, Martin Scorsese (assisted by Jay Cocks), still offers little for
Christian comfort.
The story, adapted from the 1966 novel by
Shusaku Endo, features a couple of Jesuits, Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe
(Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan from their home country
of Portugal in order to find their former mentor, Father Ferreira, who is
rumoured to have renounced his faith after being tortured by the Japanese
authorities. The two young men refuse to believe that he “apostatized” (a word
that is frequently used in the movie) and travel in the hope that they can find
him as well as spread the faith.
Their experience of Japan in 1640 is
sobering, to put it mildly. The Japanese “shogunate” is putting Christian
priests to death and executing Japanese peasants who show signs of being
converted. The two priests are forced to hide and rely on the protection of the
peasants to whom they secretly minister.
The trials of the priests – who are later
arrested – are as nothing to the tribulations of the peasants who are
dispatched in various gruesome ways for abandoning their faith in Buddhism.
Rodrigues, in particular, finds no guidance from on high to ameliorate his
spiritual torments. God is silent on this and many other matters. In this
respect, the film is well named.
Personally, I found the movie a slog. It is
often slow moving to the point of boredom and Scorsese takes way too long to
come to his point, which is that Catholicism was unable to take root in the
spiritually incompatible Japanese soil. If Christianity had been less
evangelical ... but then, of course, it would not have been Christianity. The
fact is that millions of lives have been needlessly lost throughout the dark
tunnel of human history because of this.
Scorsese, to be fair, doesn’t try to impose
his will on the viewer. In this respect he “tells it like it is”. The Japanese
are shown to be responding in a typically medieval way to a perceived threat to
their culture (which of course Christianity was), while Rodrigues is seen as an
arrogant man, blind to the cultural and spiritual differences around him,
believing as he does in the one, unquestionable truth that we all owe obeisance
to the one Christian God.
The film’s ending, which I shall not
reveal, is certainly a chilling one for Christians, although a certain
ambiguity remains.
As a movie, the film is superbly directed
and exquisitely photographed by Rodrigo Prieto (the film was shot in Taiwan),
while the performances are all perfectly adequate.
Silence reputedly took Scorsese 25 years of development hell to finally get
made, and it is the third of his religious films after The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997). I wish I could feel that it has been worth his
while. The conviction persists that many of his fans will believe that he
should stick to Italian America and the Mafia: soil that has proved much more
fertile for his cinematic vision. I will certainly be first in the queue to see
his next movie about the life of Frank Sinatra.
Silence is currently showing at Gateway – Patrick Compton
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