‘I pray but I am lost. Am I just praying to silence?‘
If master director Martin Scorsese has had a white whale throughout his long and storied career, Silence was undoubtedly it. It took 26 years for Scorsese to adapt Shūsaku Endō’s book of the same name, and the greatest tragedy of all is that when it did come out, it was mostly met with a shrug. It wasn’t that people didn’t like the movie (critics raved about it), it was that nobody saw the damn thing. I’ve been obsessed with cinema for a long time, and I have honestly never heard this film come up in conversation once ever. For whatever reason, it just didn’t make an impact. I’m here to tell you that this one will eventually come to be seen as one of Scorsese’s most personal and visceral masterpieces. Get in on the ground floor…
For such a dense and layered film, the plot is actually pretty simple. Imagine Apocalypse Now, but instead of American soldiers in Vietnam, we have Portuguese Jesuit priests in 17th Century Japan. Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) are sent to the remote Japanese village of Tomogi to confirm whether the stories of a veteran Jesuit priest (Ferreira – played by Liam Neeson) renouncing his faith are genuine or not. With an unnamed interpreter as a guide (Tadanobu Asano), the two priests find that the once large local Christian population are now scattered and in hiding – fearing for their lives.
Clocking in at almost three hours, I can see why Silence never threatened to garner mass appeal. Despite the lofty subject matter, however, this is not a film that ever feels like homework. Scorsese’s assured screenplay demonstrates an example of a man having something extremely personal to say and knowing exactly how to say it in a way that is captivating and compelling. Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography is absolutely stunning (he won an Oscar for his troubles), ensuring that Silence is perhaps Scorsese’s most visually dramatic movie, and the cast, particularly the Japanese actors, are incredible. Yōsuke Kubozuka’s turn as the all-too-human Kichijirō is stunning, and Garfield gives what is surely the greatest performance of his career. It’s a shame that Driver doesn’t appear more (he steals every scene in which he appears), but as a lapsed Catholic myself, I found Silence be almost unbearably prescient. The burden of faith comes in waves throughout the film, like a disconcerting buzzing sound that you can’t locate, and there were moments here that made me genuinely uncomfortable.
Silence is not a film to be enjoyed. Instead, this is the passion project of a genius. This is what it looks like when a master of his craft finally captures his white whale – heart-stopping, vital cinema.
