Silence (2016)

I appreciate that for director Martin Scorsese, Silence is his passion project, a film he has wanted to make for ages and he clearly poured his heart and soul into it. However he didn't manage to stir any passion for me in his tale of the apostate priests. While the struggle against religious persecution is a powerful one, much of that power is tempered by a lack of focus on colonial aspects of the story. Scorese's take is very narrow and often feels like it is leaving much out, making me ask questions for which there aren't answers, seeking perspectives not considered, and wishing for more.

Scorses focuses his story on the journey of Sebastião Rodrigues from Portugal on his quest to find the lost priest Father Ferreira, who went missing while in missioning in Japan during the Japanese purges of Christianity. It is Rodrigues' travels through espionage, then ministering to clandestine Japanese Catholics, through torture and eventually his own denunciation of his faith which is the story of Silence. The narrow focus is good in that it keeps us on path. It weakens the film as it ignores so much of the story, so much of the why, for the perspective of just one man.

For Scorsese Silence feels like a vindication of faith through the worst. His climax is the spiritual overcoming of everything the foreign oppressor has inflicted. But Scorsese's flaw is how he ignores levels of oppression to preference another. The Catholic westerners are colonialists, even Rodrigues' eventual triumph only comes because he has successfully colonized his Japanese bride, a family he inherited due to stepping into the place of a Japanese man. The religious oppression is terrible, and the film spends a great deal of time on driving this point home, but the film completely ignores what it is in response to. I believe the film, and it's message, could have been so much stronger if that relationship could have been explored. But Scorsese's piety is too strong to admit an analysis of that to his narrative, making the story feel lopsided.

Scorsese chooses not to glorify the Japanese empire through filming the beauty of the nation. Instead he focuses more closely, almost claustrophobically on his characters in their landscape. Silence is a beautiful film but Scorsese doesn't go overboard with that. Silence remains deeply personal and eschews an "epic" quality for a more individualistic approach. This heroic arc is also a very western imposition on a story set in the east.

And the theology is difficult as well. I am not sure I felt Rodrigues' religious passion. His relationship with Christ feels very much wrapped up in the trappings of Christianity as opposed to having a more personal relationship with God.  The film, and the Japanese purges, feel focused exclusively on the appearance of Christian worship and not any true connection to God. Only near the end do you feel Rodrigues start to demonstrate any true relationship with Jesus. But even by the final moments of the film, the ones designed to be the most powerful, it becomes about the ritual, the relic, the trappings of the western Christianity. Perhaps that's a telling statement about so much of Christian faith at the time (and now) but it didn't inspire me to be moved by the spirit.

So for me, while Silence had much about it which was fascinating, it left me wanting so much more. For a 2 and a half hour film, it moves along well and doesn't bore. But it rarely inspired either, focusing almost entirely on the passion (suffering) and not the passion (faith) for God.

Silence
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, Tabanobu Asano, Shinya Tsukamoto
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writers: Martin Scorsese, Jay Cocks