[193 points / 19 votes]
“When talking, or thinking, about Silence, Martin Scorsese’s thirty-years-in-the-making passion project, from the novel by Shusaku Endo, about two Portuguese Catholic missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) in the 17th century traveling to Japan to both aid the violently persecuted Japanese Catholics and to discover the truth about the fate of Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who, it’s been said, has apostatized and is currently still living in the country under a Japanese name and with a Japanese wife, it is natural, and useful, to think also of The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, Scorsese’s two earlier, explicitly religious pictures. All three films deal with religious faith, the responsibility to others of men with religious authority, oppression, and violence. Yet what recently occurred to me, and I’m certain I’m nowhere near the first person to think of this, is that the Scorsese film that philosophically, metaphysically, and passionately (if not stylistically) most gracefully, in all sense of the word, matches Silence is Mean Streets, his 1973 film about a low-level gangster played by Harvey Keitel struggling, and pretty much failing in my view, to live up to his understanding of the values of his ingrained Catholicism while continuing, with it must be said little in the way of the kind of remorse that would do anybody any good, his life of crime. Though not especially violent, and apparently not murderous, himself, and even displaying a genuine heart and genuine caring from time to time, Charlie’s, the Keitel character, willingness to not only stay put but also not stand up to any of the crime bosses who might do him good down the line, allows (in a small way, but nonetheless a real one) the violence and murder around him to continue unabated.
“Contrast this with Father Rodrigues, the character played by Andrew Garfield in Silence. Eventually, he and Father Garupe (Driver) are forced to separate in order to not further endanger the Catholic villagers to whom they’ve been bringing the long-craved-for Christian sacraments and blessings (there being no ordained priests in the village). Villagers have been brutally murdered by government officials for not admitting their Catholicism, and this will only continue if they continue to harbor two priests. But soon enough, Father Rodrigues is captured and imprisoned by The Inquisitor (an exquisitely strange and frightening Issei Ogata) who demands one thing only: that Rodrigues, and the Japanese Catholics imprisoned with Rodriques, step on a picture of Christ. This symbolic gesture will count as a renunciation of their religion and they will be free. When all refuse, the Inquisitor begins murdering the Japanese peasants. The only way to save them, Rodrigues is assured by both The Inquisitor and his translator (Tadanobu Asano, giving a performance comprised equally of fierce intelligence and complete moral indifference), is to put his foot on the face of Christ. This is purely symbolic, and it will save their lives. Believing himself to be in Hell, a terrified, furious, sickened Rodrigues continues to refuse. And he does this in the shadow of God’s apparent absence. And the violence continues unabated.
“So in Mean Streets, a man’s faith is too weak to help him or those he cares about, whereas in Silence a man’s faith is, if anything, too strong. Which I find interesting but is nevertheless a gross simplification of both films, especially Silence, a film that is for me is one of the three or four great masterpieces of Scorsese’s career. It’s a film of startling, stomach-turning violence – the opening shot of a Japanese soldier standing by severed heads on a table, the tableau lost and then found every few seconds by thick, drifting fog is one of the most alarming opening shots I’ve ever seen, particularly in a major studio production – as well as terrible bravery, and the beauty of the hope that is the bedrock of true religious faith. Much has been made by some critics, both pro and con the film as a whole, of the arrogance of Father Rodrigues, and of the missionary quest in general (some have also taken the morally grotesque route of insisting that the viewer remember that historically the hands of the Catholic Church aren’t bloodless; therefore, presumably, while we would never condone the beheading of a Japanese peasant only because he’s a Catholic, it is still worth noting etc. etc. etc.). And it’s true that, if The Inquisitor is to be taken as a man of his word (a big if, I might argue, but anyway), Rodrigues would have saved lives by stepping on that picture of Christ. It is also true that those peasants who die because he does not do this were at least under the impression that they could save their own lives by stepping on that picture themselves. Which they didn’t. Rodrigues’s argument, when faced with the accusation that he’s more complicit in their deaths than the actual executioners’, that apostatizing would be a betrayal of the victims and their faith, and would further mean that they’d died in vain, is not the argument of an arrogant man – or at least, of a man who is not merely arrogant – but rather it is the argument of a man who seems to understand death and why the Japanese Catholics died, and were willing to die, better than any of the men who by act or by order are stopping the hearts of poor villagers whose hands are tied behind their backs.
“And as a film, Silence is also rapturous. Garfield’s performance is intense in a way, and with a restraint one doesn’t often associate with intensity, that I wouldn’t have thought him capable. Late in the film, his Rodrigues appears and sounds, honestly, physically and spiritually, pummeled. And yes, he plays a certain arrogance, as well as a love for humanity, and of God, and frustration and prickliness and disgust, and abject, mortal terror. It’s an astounding piece of acting, placed in the middle of one of the most unusual and talented supporting casts that Scorsese has assembled, at least in many years. The characters played by Ogata and Asano have such color and personality. There’s a moment in the film when The Inquisitor and Rodrigues are debating their mutually intractable positions, and Rodrigues says something that deeply disappoints The Inquisitor. Ogata begins to slump in a way the audience should recognize – it’s something like a full-bodied sigh. But Scorsese holds on him long after such a physical motion would have completed itself, and Ogata continues to sink in on himself, to collapse slowly downwards in his seat. Before the shot became funny -- which it is, I believe, intentionally -- I thought ‘What am I seeing? What is happening?’ Though reserved by Scorsese’s standards, and by those of his editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Silence is a film that somehow in its visual construction, and even in its moral construction, can allow a moment like that, and still be, as it is especially late in the film, heartbreaking in its simplicity. That last shot is some kind of a flourish, though, isn’t it? Finally, Silence comes to a perfect and beautiful and sad end, and so the film becomes something that lifts up as it’s also despairing. Silence is not merely the best film of last year, but one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.” ~ Bill Ryan
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