Compared to those who came before us, we are generally fortunate to know little in the way of pain or suffering. We modern peoples of this first world are a bafflingly blessed tribe, among whom I may as well be chief. While watching Martin Scorsese’s Silence, my 32 oz. plastic cup runneth (ranneth?) over with a fine boozy porter next to a neon-yellow bag of Sour Patch Kids. Paradise isn’t an abstract concept but a place I live in day in and day out — not in an afterlife I hope awaits. The unshakable faith I have is that everything is now and will always be all right, which should mostly be true, until it isn’t.
In the meantime, we’ve got Silence, a long-in-the-works passion project of Scorsese's that offers a glimpse at the very real pain and suffering of Christians in 17th century Japan, a nation violently pushing back against Western influence.
When the biggest attack against the faith in our time is the “War on Christmas,” it can be easy to forget how rough some Christians have had it in the past. In the Japan of Silence we see government-led torture and elaborate executions ripped from the Romans’ playbook, with displays of inventive, dehumanizing brutality that would make Mel Gibson flinch.
Silence follows two young Portuguese priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) as they sneak into this “we’re-all-good-on-priests-over-here” Japan to locate their mentor (Liam Neeson), who is rumored to have given up the faith after being tortured. In Japan, the priests have their own faith tested as they see firsthand the suffering followers are forced to endure on behalf of the gospel their predecessors have brought to this land.
I should interject here to say I recognize a movie about faith — or worse, that second-most cringe-inducing of “C” words in some non-God-fearing circles, “Christianity” — may trigger a gag reflex in more militant atheists or anti-theists, but don’t let the idea of a Scorsese movie about God (which this isn’t really, by the way) keep you from giving Silence a chance. After all, this is a Martin Scorsese project, not a Kirk Cameron one.
The silence of God is the eponymous silence here, but Silence is focused on earthly beings rather than spiritual ones — specifically how the createes deal with the creator’s silence in the face of inhumane abuse and worse.
Trying to make sense of the senseless is the heavy and oft-explored heart of most human existential crises, and senselessness abounds in Silence.
Silence poses an intriguing moral dilemma for its priestly protagonists: Is it a greater sin to deny God or to refuse to deny God at the expense of others? The denial here is in the form of stepping on a simple stone tablet likeness of Jesus, a simple act that the Japanese inquisitors say can even be done in insincerity.
To talk too much of the dilemma and how it builds would be to spoil the difficult places it goes, but don’t shy away from Silence for fear of it being torture porn. While it can be at times difficult to watch, it never feels gratuitous.
What it is is slow but taut and building in intensity — a quiet film, but not a boring one. Also, for a movie about silence with minimal dialogue and lingering shots of trembling hands passing crucifixes or stone tablets in the sand, Silence isn't actually all that silent. The constant cacophony of cricket chirps and insect chatter is an unsettling soundtrack throughout that fills the swampy Japan of Silence (actually filmed in Taiwan) with a sense of dread.
Even if we can’t fully relate and wouldn’t hesitate to step on an image of any man or deity to spare ourselves and others from pain, we can feel the struggle for people whose entire lives are built on a foundation of that faith through the shaken patchy-bearded faces of the unwavering Driver and looking-for-assurance Garfield and their followers. Though it’s simple enough to shout for the Christians here to “trample” and end their suffering, their spirit of defiance is inspirational — even if it seems pointless and at times blurs the line between faith and pride or vanity. Whatever your personal beliefs, I find it impossible not to root for people who refuse to yield to power or brute force.
Worth mentioning are Silence's final scenes, a coda that is a deviation from the heralded source material and feel unnecessary — they offer a resolution that feels tacked on and deprives the film of what could have been a more ambiguous, uncomfortable closing, for better or worse.
It probably wouldn’t have taken a vision from the almighty to predict that a film about Portuguese missionaries in old-time Japan wasn’t likely to set the box office on fire, and you may be one in those ranks who feels little desire to sit through Scorsese's heavy, plodding passion project — but, for the faithful and faithless alike, Silence shows the best and worst humans are capable of and succeeds at being a film about preachers that doesn’t feel preachy.
-Eric Pulsifer
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