The Tedium and Triumph of Silence, a Review
The latest film by Martin Scorsese has, by all accounts, been something of a commercial let-down for the grandmaster of cinema. Mostly overlooked by audiences and the amorphous cabal of people who hand out awards (we’ve yet to hear the Academy Award nominations for 2017), the film seems to be sinking slowly from view having made only the smallest ripple in the cultural consciousness. It’s always an interesting case when a beloved artist such as Scorsese makes something like Silence, aggressively high-minded and earnest in pursuit of its goals as to be coldly alienating and/or face-chewingly tedious. Coming off The Wolf of Wall Street aka. the film as frat party, Silence’s theme and expression is seen in stark relief. Its achievements are difficult to dissect but I feel sure that it is indeed a triumph despite being beset by flaws along the way.
Our protagonist is one Padre Rodriguez who is played to coiffed perfection by British actor Andrew Garfield. I mean there are points in the film where he looks more like he’s auditioning to play Mufasa in The Lion King Musical than suffering the spiritual pangs of Christianity.
It’s absurd and yet, and yet, he symbolises the absolute acme of stereotypical representations of Jesus Christ in Western culture. The more the film went along the more I felt sure this was a very conscious artistic choice and that as opposed to experiencing Rodriguez from an objective point of view we were in fact experiencing him from a subjective one. The film belongs to Rodriguez and in Garfield Scorsese picked an actor who is able to convey suitable amounts of earnestness and arrogance. There is perhaps one moment where the film draws back from this subjectivity whereupon Garfield sees his reflection in a pool of water and it is that of a painted Messiah. It’s heavy-handed but it does the trick. In this way, the film’s form coheres with the viewing experience — the audience suffers each step of the way as Rodriguez does. This necessarily means there are longueurs in the story. Patterns repeat themselves, real progress is slow, conversations loop around and end up revealing very little. A little bit like life one could say.
Alongside a pure narrative track the film also delivers 161 minutes of heart-stoppingly beautiful shotmaking and cinematography. See this film on a big screen and I dare you not to be stupefied in your chair by its smoky landscapes, its muddy fingers held out in supplication, the freshness of the sea that carries the cadavers of dissidents, the long reeds that conceal a rendezvous — shot after shot emanating the stunning power of a Caravaggio painting. Much as been said about Scorsese’s love affair with the great Italian artist but never has that been on display to such great effect as here. The casting of Adam Driver only enhances this quality; a man whose face looks like it’s been hewn from paint and hung to stare out enigmatically at shuffling tourists on the walls of a venerated cultural institute. He’s damn good in the film too by the way as Padre Garupe, pragmatic and principled in contrast to Rodriguez’s delusions of martyrdom.
None of the above is to say that the film doesn’t have flaws. The representation of the Japanese characters can be troubling, despite the fact that a lot of the ideas expressed are taken verbatim from Japanese author Shūsaku Endō’s novel of the same name. The villain of the piece, a Governor who leads the inquisition is deliciously played by Issey Ogata but nevertheless has more than a touch of the ‘Other’ about him. However, this may be because as a Japanese Catholic Endō brings an outsider perspective to his homeland that Scorsese merely adopts with his camera.
Yōsuke Kubozuka gets the best of it as Kichijiro who is able to survive the violence heaped upon his fellow Christians. He struck me as the sanest character of the lot, alive to the hollowness of ostentatious shows of apostasy thus allowing him to maintain his faith until the very end. The one cynical note amidst a chorus of sincerity. Other people have I believe rightly commented on the oddity of English-speaking actors playing Portuguese characters speaking English with what can only be termed a deracinated European inflection. This has long been a pet peeve of mine in films and, though the beauty of Silence ultimately quelled my irritation, I can see that it could be distracting.
All this brings me to my main question: why is a film about a religious quest still important in the 21st century? Well because not many people make art about religion anymore. A certain brand of non-confrontational secularity has spread to most of Hollywood’s films with those focused on Christianity reduced to genre propaganda that has little traction with mainstream cinema-going. But it is still a hugely dynamic force that shapes our world in a myriad of ways. Lest we forget that the cloak of religion allows for paradoxical beliefs such as bigotry and tolerance to blossom under its wing. Alms-giving sits side by side with murder depending on who you’re talking to. Silence is important precisely because it is at least attempting to make a serious film about the nature of faith both as a weapon for violence and power and as a methodology by which to live your life. And it mostly succeeds. I find it interesting that so many people have commented negatively on the running time of the film despite the fact that The Wolf of Wall Street is actually longer. Perhaps it is easier to watch someone be bad for three hours than someone strive to be good. I guess they do say the Devil has all the best tunes.
