He'd probably say Scorsese is no stranger to the movie's major themes: catholicism, faith, guilt. And he'd be right. Whether Scorsese is dealing with gangsters or taxi drivers, he's always struggling with the same themes. What's right, what's wrong and how do you deal with the feelings you get from doing one or the other.
Scorsese has never dealt with these themes quite as literally as he does here with SILENCE, since it's about a couple of Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan to find out what has happened to their mentor and fellow priest (Liam Neeson). It's the 1600s and Christianity is frowned upon in Japan to the point that missionaries and converts are tortured and executed. Rumor has it Neeson committed apostasy and turned his back on Christ. Garfield and Driver want to find out if that's true and, if they can, spread their religion in the mean time.
After all, as the film starts, the Catholic church is about ready to give up on converting the Japanese, so this makes Garfield and Driver the last two priests sent into the foreign land. They meet up with a drunken and disheveled Japanese Christian-convert (Yōsuke Kubozuka) who serves as their guide and leads them to a faithfully converted village whose citizens live in fear of being discovered by the torturous and murderous inquisitor (Issei Ogata).
This is where things get complicated. The priests are putting the village in danger by being there. The village wants them there because they need religious guidance and leadership in their persecution. If they're caught, they'll be tortured and punished unless they renounce their religion. They can renounce their religion and still believe in it, but what's the point, in that case. If they turn their backs on Christ to avoid discomfort, do they really believe?
Now, this is where I might be shallow. Faced with similar problems I'd probably say to myself, "Look, Jesus will understand if you pretend not to believe in him just so you can avoid torture." So I'd renounce Christ, avoid torture, and then later be like, "Hey, Jesus, you know I was just saying that to avoid torture, right?" Because, to me, it seems like Jesus wouldn't want you to be tortured and would totally understand if you sold him out briefly to avoid it.
But this is what sets me apart from the characters in the movie. In the movie, of course, it's blasphemous to even pretend to give up on Christ and so everyone's trapped. The philosophical question, then, becomes, is it cool for the priests to refuse to give in if their people are going to be tortured? Or would it be more Christian of them to renounce Christ just to save their people from suffering?
I guess what makes this interesting is that we're not viewing it from an outside point of view, but firmly from the point of view of the totally 100% devout Jesuit priests. Throughout, Garfield struggles with his faith, and the title of the film refers to the silence of God and Jesus in the face of all of this suffering, and also refers to the apparent breaking of that silence during a crucial sequence near the end of the film.
Watching the flick I kept remembering that I'd just seen Garfield as a similarly suffering and devout Christian in HACKSAW RIDGE just a month or two ago. How interesting that he'd show up on screen in two similar roles. Of course, HACKSAW deals with the physical and emotional ways in which Garfield's character puts his faith into action and SILENCE deals with the opposite -- the way action must be resisted to preserve faith.
All this religious and philosophical stuff aside, the movie is beautiful to behold. All of the locations, almost exclusively outdoors and in nature, are breathtaking and all of the performances go for broke. Ogata is particularly good as the inquisitor, but there's also Tadanobu Asano as an interpreter who starts as almost impartial but bends every translated line into a contemptuous argument against faith. I mentioned the guide to the Jesuits before, Kubozuka, who is the most outwardly flawed character but who might hold the most keys to redemption -- at least he knows he's flawed.
This film is one of Scorsese's best in a career of masterpieces. Apparently it's a passion project he's been trying to get off the ground for years. Well, I'm glad it's finally here. It's fitting, I think, that America's greatest living gangster poet is also America's greatest living theological filmmaker, because it takes a guy who understands where those two worlds intersect to be able to say anything worthwhile about either of them. The only thing this movie leaves me wishing for is the words to describe what I thought about it, because I'm not doing it justice.
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