Silence

Directed By: Martin ScorseseWritten By: Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks (based on the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo)Starring: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam

Neeson, Yosuke Kubozuka, Issey Ogata

The opening shots of Martin Scorsese’s Silence offer elegant, natural terrains enraptured in an ethereal like mist and fog, transforming the inherently alluring into something grave and ghostly. Scorsese, cinema’s ultimate talisman, with immediacy establishes his setting not as something to be observed with the eye, but with the stomach, undermining Taiwan’s stunning vistas with a sense of dread and quiet despair that suggests these grounds are more akin to a cemetery than a landscape. The film was shot by Rodrigo Prieto, a familiar hand in Scorsese land after lensing The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013, and his photography wows with its ability to identify an air of the apocalyptic within something beautiful.

These opening images, which also depict a crestfallen Liam Neeson lowered to his knees as he observes fellow Christians undergo torture, set the tone for perhaps the most gruelling, protracted, joyless (all deliberately so) outing in the catalogue of America’s greatest living filmmaker.

Liam Neeson plays a man who was at one time Father Ferreira, a Portuguese Jesuit assumed to have denounced his faith under the pain of torture and the prospect of death. He is believed to be lost in Japan in the 17^th century, Taiwan doubles for the Land of the Rising Sun, a time in the country’s history in which Christianity was being violently eradicated like a mildew; the roots of Christianity, we are told, shall never take hold in the “swamp” like Japanese soils. Unlike many other Scorsese films, Silence isn’t a film of gruesome imagery, of blood addled violence, but it is a film in which the weight of violence is constant, perpetually driving down on the viewer’s shoulders with no respite. The Japanese seek to kill Christianity through a range of tortures- pouring the waters of a hot spring onto to bare Christian chests through punctured ladles, the punctures allowing the water to drop slowly, each splash becoming its own individual coal; stringing believers upside down by their feet, a small incision made on their necks ensuring their blood doesn’t merely rush to their heads and render them unconscious; men tied to crucifixes and left on the beaches where the tides will rise and the waves will batter them to death.

Perhaps the greatest torture practiced by the Japanese, however, is psychological. Killing Christians in protest of their religious faiths will only turn them into martyrs, make them stronger. Instead they must be

turned, proselytised through symbolic gestures of apostasy; stepping on a plate bearing the image of Christ; spitting on a Cross; cursing Mary as a whore.

Father Ferreira is presumed to have succumbed to these tortures and denounced his religion, but his apparent renunciation is not readily accepted by his two protégés, Jesuits Rodrigues and Garupe (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver respectively), who endeavour to journey into Japan and recover Ferreira, whilst re-instilling the Christian faith in the few Japanese locals who remain receptive to it.

In many a sense, Silence isn’t recognisable as a Scorsese picture. One may be inclined to think of whip crack pacing, bustling cityscapes, big band/rock and roll inflected soundtracks and criminal underworlds as Scorsesian staples. Silence is not one of these Scorsese films; certainly, if this film were to be placed side-by-side with The Wolf of Wall Street, there would seldom be a hint the two were made by people from the same planet, let alone the same man. But it is beneath the skin of Silence where it finds affinities with so many other Scorsese works. Scorsese is compelled by the examination of men who fight to reconcile their inner beliefs with their outward actions. Consider Billy Costigan in The Departed, a police officer who in his desire to serve his city must go undercover and become one with the very criminal world he is trying to bring to justice. Consider Travis Bickle who grows so obsessed with cleansing New York’s seedy streets that in his efforts he resorts to the exact violence and criminality he is warring against; or Howard Hughes and Henry Hill, two men propelled by creating images of pristineness and power for themselves, but who descend more and more into paranoia and dirty desperation in their attempts to maintain said image; or how about Jesus Christ himself, who in The Last Temptation of Christ must negotiate his very human capacity to be tempted with his duties a

s the all good Son of God.

Now Andrew Garfield’s Rodrigues finds himself longing to be a beacon of faith, a man who fancies himself to be something of a 17^th century Jesus (his appearance certainly becomes more and more Christ like as the film wears on), but whose faith is inwardly wavering under the weight Japan’s extreme Christian persecution.

He and Garupe enter Japan under the guide of a drunken, tramp like fisherman Kichijiro, well played by Yosuke Kubozuka, a Christian at heart but a man who too has succumbed to the trials of his country. A fleeting source of wry humour in the film can be seen in Kichijiro’s shameless, reoccurring apostasy as soon as he senses pressure. Rodrigues finds initial encouragement in Japan’s underground Christian community, whom he satiates by taking confession, but as he and Garupe begin to sense their own imminent capture and torture, Rodrigues grows disenchanted by the silence suggested in the film’s title that meets his prayers. Rodrigues is eventually captured and subjected to the rhetoric of “the inquisitor”, played by Issey Ogata with a wonderfully mannered performance, one that too has a slight comic inflection detectable in the odd cadence of the character’s speech and the exaggerated nature of his movements.

Rodrigues torture isn’t physical though, as to avoid the previously mentioned possibility of martyring the priest. Instead, Rodrigues is tasked with the pain of others. Other practicing Christians will be freed from their torment if Rodrigues apostatizes, and yet he won’t. Ironically, one begins to sense that Rodrigues wishes to be tortured, even killed, as this would draw an affinity between himself and Christ. “Arrogant”, the priest is labelled due to his positioning himself as a sacrificial figurehead for his religion. Wouldn’t common sense dictate that a verbal submission from Rodrigues in exchange for the physical relief of others is an obvious trade? Perhaps the priest’s devotion to Christ is born more out of egotism than true faith;

perhaps Rodrigues’ faith is selfish; perhaps the notion of Jesuit priests infiltrating a nation that openly denounces them to instil their faith in said nation is imperialist. The fact that Scorsese, a man who identifies as a lapsed Catholic but whose personality is so shaped by his religious upbringing, is willing to pose such questions, to challenge his protagonist when the character so easily could’ve been a hub for sympathy, is Silence’s great triumph. The director’s own religious compass is imperceptible, there are, after all, more intriguing matters at hand, and Scorsese translates these matters into a film that is as ideologically dense as it is dense with physicality. He may not have the answers to these questions, Silence is more an exploration rather than an explanation, but to pose such fascinating questions is enough to envelop the mind.

Silence is Scorsese’s Everest, a passion project it has taken the director over 25 years to summit and finally commit to film after first crossing Shusaku Endo’s source material in 1988, and it is here it must be noted that that the director’s passion does have a tendency to work against him. In the case of Silence, so hellbent is Scorsese on wringing every ounce of visceral heft, every ounce of morbid beauty, and every ounce of affect from every frame, that the director tends to linger on the imagery to an excess. Silence is near three hours, and feels longer. It’s possible that if the director weren’t so transfixed by his own material he may have identified a more efficient means of relaying his story, one more accessible and less exhausting. It is then, very much a film that requires the viewer to take their own leap of faith; Silence is a cinematic battle of attrition, a movie which demands one endure a great deal before they are rewarded. It’s a leap of faith I personally was willing to make.

Rating:

3.25/4