Silence (2016)

Silence (2016)

IMDB Movie rating 7.8/10

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writers: Jay Cocks (screenplay), Martin Scorsese (screenplay) | 1 more credit »

Stars: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson

 Story line 

The story of two Catholic missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who face the ultimate test of faith when they travel to Japan in search of their missing mentor (Liam Neeson) - at a time when Catholicism was outlawed and their presence forbidden.

Imdb link here

   

Martin Scorsese's 'Silence' Speaks Loudest To The Faithful

When I was in 10th grade, I did a school report on Islam. It wasn’t anything too deep and I wouldn’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I was fascinated by the concept of “taqiya.” Basically, as I understood it at the time, the faithful are allowed to publicly renounce or deny their faith if doing so would save their life or prevent persecution. That seemed like such a logical bit of dogma for any religion, the idea that a higher being would totally understand the need to deny your faith to someone who might kill you for it. That notion stayed in my mind for the entirety of Martin Scorsese’s Silence, which is a slow-burn passion play in which plenty of suffering might have been avoided via a little taqiya.

Based on Shūsaku Endō’s beloved 1966 novel of the same name, Silence concerns two Portuguese Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who find themselves journeying to Japan to locate their mentor (Liam Neeson) who is alleged to have committed apostasy (i.e., publicly renounced his faith) under torture. The film quickly becomes an odyssey of the faithful being tested by a local government willing to stop at nothing to undo the small foothold that the religion has taken within the nation. As the priests watch devout Christians lay down their lives for their faith, in a manner not dissimilar to Jesus’ own sacrifice, they start to question not so much their own faith but rather the moral and spiritual value of martyrdom.

 There is no glory in these poor villagers going to their deaths, and for these missionaries it may be as much about pride as it is about faith. As we watch sequences of Japanese converts being tortured and brutalized, either for refusing to symbolically renounce their faith or in order to convince our protagonists to do the same, the allegedly grand act of religiously-based self-sacrifice is rendered in all its inhumane and cruel ordinariness. The suffering and violence is not sensationalized and is rendered utterly ordinary, which removes its mystique. That matter-of-factness is at peace with the film as whole, as the actions and choices of the various participants are presented with little explicit judgment.

Yes, there is obvious sympathy to be had for the seemingly good-hearted priests who believe that they are saving the souls of these otherwise “doomed” people. And, without any hand-holding, Scorsese and co-writer Jay Cocks make a show of understanding why those in power thought it best, even via inhumane actions, to banish this imperialistic religion from their shores. Inspector Inoue (Issey Ogata), talks at length about the reasons for these actions, and it is impossible not to be reminded of the many times when Christians conducted similar behavior against alleged “heretics.” In a skewed way, Yosuke Kubozuka’s Kichijiro, a man who shows up to save his own skin an almost comical number of times, has the right idea.

But, as lushly made and well-acted as this passion project is (Andrew Garfield is quickly becoming one of the best actors of his generation), I will admit that it becomes a bit monotonous, especially to agnostics like myself who aren’t feeling the spiritual dilemmas in their very bones. The picture falls into a pattern of one priest or another watching the faithful undergo grim punishments for refusing to apostatize, feeling torn and conflicted about it, and then being put in the same situation yet again. Going back to my opening thoughts, I spent much of the movie wondering why a Christian God wouldn't allow his followers a little "live to fight another day" wiggle room, with the obvious caveat that there was no guarantee that renouncing your god in such a situation would save your life.

Things pick up a bit, at least in terms of diversifying the onscreen imagery, once this journey into the heart of darkness meets up with its would-be Colonel Kurtz. It’s no spoiler to say that we do meet Liam Neeson’s Father Ferreira again before the end. The conversations between him and his protégé(s) are among the highlights of a film that makes its point pretty well by the end of the first act and then continues to make it for another couple hours. Silence ends quite well, with a final shot that will provide much debate and dissection, and it is unquestionably a success in terms of its specific goals. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto paints a lush picture, with imagery that occasionally resembles classic European paintings made alive. And this is exactly the kind of thing we should be encouraging from major studios alongside the standard tentpole fare.

But, for this relative non-believer, Silence is an occasional exercise in frustration. To be fair, it at least halfheartedly confronts the notion of being made to sympathize with European missionaries and their inherently imperialistic goals. It plays with any number of notions concerning the actual existence of God, a de-glamorization of martyrdom (especially when someone else is being martyred for you), and the practical value of self-sacrifice versus surviving to be a witness to history. Silence is a very good film that nonetheless does not speak to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t speak to you, or that it doesn’t have clear artistic value beyond its theological implications.

 Read full review at Forbes

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Movie Rating ★★★★★

 Scorsese's brutal spiritual epic will scald – and succor – your soul   

Awkward, golden, deafening, deathly: silence comes in countless forms, though there’s always something more to it than the mere absence of sound. We ascribe silence a physical presence – talk about keeping it, sitting in it, even dwelling in it. And like all physical objects, with enough strength it can be broken.

In the monumental new film from Martin Scorsese – his 24th in half a century, not counting documentaries and television work – silence is the sound of the voice of God. It’s the answer He gives to every question posed of Him by Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), a devout Portuguese Jesuit priest saving souls undercover in rural 17th century Japan.

And it’s His only response when the country’s Kakure Kirishitans – the sect of "hidden Christians" converted by missionaries like Rodrigues – are smoked out by the shogun’s forces and summarily drowned, beheaded, burnt alive or bled out like butchered meat. In other words, it’s nothing – but the nothingness is as loud as the slowly building scream of insects with which the film begins, before it cuts to the audio equivalent of black.

That Scorsese could have made this plangent, scalding work of religious art so soon after The Wolf of Wall Street is inconceivable. Based on a 1966 novel, Chinmoku, by the Japanese Catholic writer Shusako Endo (already masterfully adapted once for the screen in 1977 in its original language by Masahiro Shinoda), it’s as soul-pricklingly attuned to matters transcendent and eternal as that previous film was drenched in the short-lived and sticky pleasures of the profane.

It’s the kind of work a great filmmaker can only pull off with a lifetime’s accrued expertise behind him. And its representation of death as something faced alone, no matter which collective causes your life may have stood for, gives it a capital-Fs Final Film air that is itself spiritually bracing (though Scorsese is reportedly poised to shoot his 25th, The Irishman, in February)

It’s a film about the search for God in circumstances defined by His absence. In an opening voiceover, Liam Neeson’s Father Cristóvão Ferreira, Rodrigues’s former teacher and confessor, notes that the Japanese describe the volcanic springs the shogun’s forces use to torture Christian missionaries as "hells": “Partly in mockery, and partly, I must tell you, in truth.” (The opening shot shows two priests’ heads, recently detached and lolling on a wooden trestle, by the side of one of these steaming pools – which, you know, bodes well.)

Ferreira goes on to explain that these priests not only refused to apostatise – that is, publicly renounce their faith, in this case by trampling on an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary – but asked to be tortured, “so they could demonstrate the power of their faith.”

When word reaches Rodrigues and his fellow priest Father Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver) that Ferreira has not only committed apostasy himself, but gone wholly native, Colonel Kurtz style, in the countryside near the port town of Nagasaki, the two young men set out to find him, so his honour can be restored.

They brace for hardship, but what they encounter is throat-clutching horror – peasants praying to Deusu, the Christian god, by guttering torchlight, not daring to share their faith with nearby villages for fear of being sniffed out by Inquisitor Inoue (a magnificent, slightly Christoph Waltz-like performance from Issei Ogata, every line laced with sugar and arsenic) and his brutal retinue.

Garfield and Driver couldn’t imaginably be better – or better cast. Even physically, the contrast between them makes for great cinema: Garfield a spindly stem of wheat, glowing with goodness, Driver sloping, tapered, even (in the handsomest possible way) a little fungal. But it’s their performances, in which both actors drill down into very different seams of piety, that hold your sympathies in flux throughout.

Each one views Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka), a born survivor among the natives who begins the film as their guide, very differently – and as Rodrigues’s own journey of endurance through Japan starts to take on the shape of Christ’s Passion, it’s his dealings with this brilliantly exasperating character that become the measure of his grace.

Meanwhile, Neeson’s Father Ferreira lurks somewhere in the background: when he finally surfaces it’s only for three scenes, but each one comes down with the lasting impact of a branding iron, leaving the tang of char behind it.

Grace may be the toughest of all spiritual conditions to capture on film: it’s why so few directors even attempt it. Scorsese, who spent a year in a seminary before making movies, has never shied away from matters religious – themes of guilt and redemption run through everything from The Last Temptation of Christ to Taxi Driver – but Silence seems to bring it all telescoping into perspective.

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

Read full review at Telegraph

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Questions and Prayers Go Unanswered in Scorsese’s ‘Silence’

Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” is a story of faith and anguish. It tells of a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Rodrigues, who in 1643 heads into the dark heart of Japan, where Christians are being persecuted — boiled alive, immolated and crucified. Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) sets out to help keep the church alive in Japan, a mission that perhaps inevitably leads to God. The film’s solemnity is seductive — as is Mr. Scorsese’s art — especially in light of the triviality and primitiveness of many movies, even if its moments of greatness also make its failures seem more pronounced.

Mr. Scorsese’s work has long involved struggles of faith of one kind or another, from the religious guilt that afflicts Harvey Keitel’s thug in “Mean Streets” (“You don’t make up for your sins in the church.”) through that circle of hell known as “The Wolf of Wall Street.” In “Silence” the struggle begins in a mist-wreathed landscape where severed human heads rest on a crude shelf, like trophies of some ghastly victory. Today, decapitations in the name of religion are a gruesome hallmark of Islamist extremists, but here they introduce a dispute involving the Japanese authorities, who, intent on maintaining the country’s power and isolation, are set on eradicating Christianity, its proselytizers and converts.

Figures soon emerge from the mist, notably Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who, as gaunt and tormented as any martyred Caravaggio saint, watches in gaping horror as guards ladle water from hot springs on shrieking Christians. Rodrigues learns about this hellish scene from Father Valignano (Ciaran Hinds), who also relates that Ferreira has renounced his religion and is living as “a Japanese.” Rodrigues, having studied with Ferreira, refuses to accept that the older priest’s belief has been shattered and departs for Japan accompanied by another priest, Father Garupe (a fine, underused Adam Driver), and a Japanese guide, Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka, excellent).

The movie’s early scenes are filled with severe pictorial beauty as the pale thermal steam snaking around the martyred Christians gives way to the vaulted white room where the black-clothed Jesuits meet. The chromatic contrast between the inkiness of their cassocks and the room’s ascetic whiteness finds an echo in Rodrigues’s rigid dualism, a belief in absolutes that will be tested. His resoluteness even seems answered by the calm camerawork (no jitters here), which early on is dramatically punctuated by a ravishing overhead shot of the three Jesuit priests gliding down a flight of stony, bleach-white stairs, as if they were being looked down on from high above.

Whether this represents God’s vision or that of the priests, it is very much the point of view of the movie’s own creator. This overhead shot and others suggest that there’s a divine aspect to the priests’ mission, an idea that Mr. Scorsese visually and narratively underlines in the Lazarus-like cave in which Rodrigues and Garupe first take shelter in Japan; in Rodrigues’s self-aggrandizing identification with Jesus; and, crucially, through the figure of Judas. As in Mr. Scorsese’s 1988 film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” his messy, excitingly alive adaptation of that Nikos Kazantzakis novel, Judas must play a part in “Silence” because without him there can be no Jesus.

Once in Japan, Rodrigues and Garupe make contact with a village of hidden Christians, who live in fear of the authorities and a cobralike smiler known as the Inquisitor, Inoue (Issey Ogata, in one of the film’s strongest performances). By day, the priests hide in a small, cramped hut near the village; by night, they lead their new flock in dimly lighted rooms, delivering sermons in Latin, baptizing children and taking confession. Mr. Scorsese draws some modest, uneasy comedy from the linguistic and cultural differences between the priests and their congregation, as when a grabby, highly agitated woman begs the rather startled Garupe to hear her confession.

Despite the mugging from both confessor and confessed, the exchange feels forced and comes across as a bid to lighten the gloom; if anything, it turns a feverish plea for absolution into a bit of vaudeville. There’s something uncomfortably and literally childlike about this child of God, who, like the other villagers, with their pleading eyes and hands, seems like a relic from a white-savior myth. Kichijiro, who enters grunting and twitching, as if in homage to Toshiro Mifune, and grovels at the priest’s feet, also seems on hand as much for comic relief as for guidance. Yet, even as the film seems to share the outsider perspectives of Rodrigues and Garupe, instructively, it is the village elders — brilliantly played by Yoshi Oida and Shinya Tsukamoto — who give these scenes flesh, bone and pain.

“Silence” is based on the 1966 novel by the Japanese author Shusaku Endo that has attracted heavyweight admirers since it was first published. Graham Greene praised the novel, as did John Updike; for years, Mr. Scorsese tried to turn it into a film. (He wrote the foreword for a recent edition.) Filled with reams of religious dialogue, the novel fictionalizes history — the 17th-century purging of Christianity in Japan — as a means to explore religious faith and cultural difference. What preoccupies Endo is whether Western Christianity can take root in what the Inquisitor describes as “this swamp of Japan,” which seems inhospitable to outside forces. It’s a story of God, nation and myth.

It’s easy to understand Mr. Scorsese’s interest in the novel and specifically in the character of Rodrigues. Despite the priest’s piety, black vestments and narrative prominence, he is no more a Hollywood hero than most of Mr. Scorsese’s falling and fallen men, with their arrogance and vanity. Rodrigues cowers in fear, recoils from his flock and assures himself of the goodness that the church — and he, by extension — has brought. (He pities the worshipers but is proud of his ministering.) His faith, including in himself, sustains Rodrigues, but even as he tends to the souls of the hidden Christians he fails to ease their earthly suffering. God is silent; in a way, so is this most ardent missionary.

The silence of the title resounds insistently; it’s in the screams of the faithful and in Rodrigues’s endless searching. Why, he agonizes with no self-awareness, does God not answer prayers and alleviate suffering, a question which proves too heavy a load for Mr. Garfield’s talents. When he plays against the other actors, he can seem as decorative as a plaster saint (his luxuriously styled hair is right out of a 1950s biblical epic), which makes the other performers and their characters look stronger, and works for the story. Rodrigues is weak. But it’s weakness without depth or the burning belief that would make his errors shattering. When he carries on alone, speaking to God, questioning and suffering at great, monotonous length, his weakness becomes tedious, as does the film.

“Silence” argues against orthodoxy, but its messenger is too pallid. This is less the fault of Mr. Garfield than of Mr. Scorsese’s conception of Rodrigues as the story’s fulcrum instead of its void. Mr. Scorsese fills the film with haunting tableaus and performances — including from Tadanobu Asano, as the Interpreter — that tug from the edges, pulling attention away from its center. In the end, nothing that Rodrigues says resonates as deeply as Inoue’s terrifying, teasing whine, which conveys the larger cultural and political stakes; nothing imparts the mystery of creation as potently as the flicker of a darting emerald lizard or an eerie parade of cats prowling through a spookily deserted village.

These moments shake “Silence” and you too; the movie could use more jolts, more trembling, more surrealism; maybe, as in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” a talking lion to go along with its trippy lizard. “Silence” is as visually striking as you might expect, but also overly tidy, clean and decorous, despite its tortured flesh, its mud and its blood. There’s a crushing lack of urgency to this story and its telling, perhaps because it took Mr. Scorsese, who wrote the script with Jay Cocks, so long to make “Silence.” It’s disappointing because few directors can engage doubt and belief as powerfully as Mr. Scorsese can, but also because doubt and belief have again set the world on fire.

Read full review at New york times

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Movie Rating ★★★★☆

The last temptation of Liam Neeson in Scorsese's shattering epic

Returning to themes which have haunted his whole career, Martin Scorsese has made a film of grandeur and great fervour about Christianity, martyrdom and the silence of God

The silence of God – or the deafness of man – is the theme of Martin Scorsese’s epic new film about an ordeal of belief and the mysterious, ambiguous heroism involved in humiliation and collaboration. It is about an apparent sacrifice in the service of the greater good, and a reckoning deferred to some unknowable future time. The possibility of reaching some kind of accommodation with the enemy, and not knowing if this is a disavowal of pride or a concession to the greatest sin of all, is a topic that Scorsese last touched upon in The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, in which Jesus sees a future of peace and ordinary comfort.

Silence is a drama about Christian martyrdom, and like all such films, from Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons, it must address an atheist counter-sensibility aware that the Catholic Inquisition itself saw no difficulty in putting perceived heretics to death, and that arguably their own martyrs are therefore ineligible for lenient humanist sympathy. In fact, in this movie there is a fierce debate about the opposition of Christianity and Buddhism, of Europe and Asia, and about the relativism of faith.

Silence is not without flaws. Perhaps the casting of its stars, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, could have been reversed, to place more emphasis on Driver as the stronger performer, though Garfield’s boyish screen personality becomes haunted and complex. There is something a little broad about the moments in which a priest sees visions of Christ in himself. Yet with ambition and reach, and often a real dramatic grandeur, Scorsese’s film has addressed the imperial crisis of Christian evangelists with stamina, seriousness and a gusto comparable to David Lean’s.

The picture is adapted by Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks from the celebrated 1966 novel Silence by the Japanese Catholic author Shūsaku Endō. It has in fact been filmed twice before, by Masahiro Shinoda in 1971 and João Mario Grilo as The Eyes of Asia in 1994.

In 17th-century Lisbon, two fiercely committed missionary priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garrpe (Adam Driver), are told disturbing news by their confessor Valignano (Ciarán Hinds) concerning their much loved and admired mentor figure, Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Ferreira had journeyed to Japan many years before to challenge its brutal suppression of Christianity and to spread the word, but has now reportedly been forced to recant his faith under torture, and is living as a Buddhist with a Japanese wife and children. Astonished and outraged, the two young Jesuits refuse to believe it and demand to be allowed to travel to Japan to track him down and discover the truth.

Scorsese shows that their journey has something Conradian about it, and that Ferreira is a kind of Kurtz figure, albeit a Kurtz who has achieved nothing like a colonial kingdom. As the two men make their furtive landfall in Japan, they make tensely secret contact with fugitive believers who live in terror of being found out, and the priests entertain an orientalist stereotype of the supposed Japanese inscrutability: “Secrecy has made their faces into masks.”

Rodrigues and Garrpe seem like the proselytisers of the early Christian church, or even the apostles themselves. Driver’s gaunt and blazingly passionate face even makes him look a little like the traditional rendering of Jesus. But the examples of Judas the betrayer and Peter the denier are the ones that suggest themselves. Because everywhere, the authorities are crushing Christian communities, offering rewards for informers, and the priests’ mere presence brings their congregants into terrible danger. Suspected believers are ordered symbolically to trample a figure of Jesus underfoot: sometimes the inquisitor will be content with a relatively perfunctory step on the figure, but for more serious dissidents, spitting on the crucified Christ is needed. And there is the cruelty of torture and martyrdom: Christians can be lowered into a pit to bleed to death, or crucified in the surf for a quasi-drowning ordeal, or burned at the stake.

But Rodrigues is to come into contact with the sinuously calm, even almost charming Inquisitor Inoue and his interpreter (excellent performances from Issey Ogata and Tadanobu Asano), whose purpose is far more subtle: to show what torture looks like – rather as the Inquisition simply showed Galileo the instruments of cruelty – but then persuade the priest to renounce Christianity on rational grounds. Playing their strongest card, they produce poor, mortified Ferreira, who after years of threats and indoctrination has internalised his captors’ views, denying that the Catholic church was ever believed in that country, and claiming that the Japanese had simply followed a muddled, pantheistic sun-worship sect and mistook it for Christianity.

All the time, the priests are tormented by God’s silence, and the question of whether this is the same as absence, or if God’s refusal to intervene has become an unimaginable and intolerable cruelty. “How can I explain his silence to these people?” As the drama continues, the silence is broken for Rodrigues: but it is, ambiguously, a voice in his own head, giving him advice similar to that which he had himself given to cowering Japanese peasants early in the story.

Silence is a movie of great fervour that resolves itself into a single thought: if a believer is forced to recant, yet maintains a hidden impregnable core of secret faith, a hidden finger-cross, is that a defeat or not? God sees all, of course, including the way a public disavowal of faith has dissuaded hundreds or thousands from believing. Is the public theatre of faith more important than a secret bargain with a silent creator? It is a question kept on a knife-edge. Martin Scorsese’s powerful, emotional film takes its audience on a demanding journey with a great sadness at its end.

Read Full review at The guardian

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