Silence (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆

Silence (2016) – M. Scorsese

How will Scorsese go down in film history (since this is one of his passions)? Will he be considered a director with a few great masterpieces (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas) who then tried his hand at everything with some middling results (e.g., John Huston)?  Or a great all-rounder (e.g., Howard Hawks)?  Perhaps he has higher aspirations? After all, Ingmar Bergman also called a film (The) Silence, 1963.  But this wasn’t the film in which a priest questioned God’s existence (that was Winter Light, 1963), as Andrew Garfield’s Rodrigues does here when he is witnessing the suffering of Christians in 17^th century Japan.  Garfield (and also everywhere man Adam Driver) is a missionary sent to spread the faith and to bolster the victims of Japan’s efforts to wipe out the religion, not unlike Liam Neeson’s Ferreira sent earlier and now presumed lost.  The story goes that Ferreira capitulated when the Inquisitor asked him to renounce Jesus/God by stepping on his picture.  However, Garfield and Driver won’t believe this.  Many trials later (this is a long movie), Neeson appears and offers a pragmatic solution.  The project seems near to Scorsese’s heart but he lets it drift along. He wants to portray men whose faith is strong enough to endure any hardship – and to characterise their internal struggle – but either Garfield is miscast (or hasn’t the acting chops) or Scorsese himself is ambivalent.  There are moments when the Japanese perspective, arguing that the colonizing efforts of the West must stop, seems to have his sympathy (not considering the bloodthirsty tortures that they wreak on all Christians here in some incredible set-pieces).  Or perhaps it is just my lack of faith that makes this particular cause seem in vain when other more important causes (social justice, more broadly) should dominate? Scorsese and his team create some shots of grand pictorial beauty in this film which must have been awesome on the big screen but he can’t match the transcendental and spiritual themes of his forebears (Bergman, Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Ozu). He’ll go down in history somewhere in the middle.