Silence

Martin Scorsese’s years-in-the-making passion project, based on the Japanese novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō, is a strong piece of filmmaking. That’s not to say it’s a good work of entertainment by any means. No, here, the director is in a petrifyingly serious mode, more solemn than his last out-and-out religious film The Last Temptation of Christ, more pained than even Raging Bull. He’s made longer pictures, but between the pace and the heaviness of its subject, Silence seems to last longer, almost like it’s work to watch. I wouldn’t quite go so far to compare it to a religious trial, though considering what the film’s about, it’s possible that's what Scorsese had in mind.

The setting is Edo Japan in the mid-1600s, a time when Christians were brutally persecuted in the country. From this hostile land comes news that a Portuguese Jesuit missionary (Liam Neseson) has committed apostasy and joined the Japanese. Two pupils of his (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) are sent to the country to find him and learn the truth. Upon arrival, they find small sects of Japanese Christians (the Kakure Kirishitans) living secretly, in fear of torture and death at the hands of the authorities, and deprived of the basic rituals of the Church. Mostly, the journey is told from Garfield’s point of view as he struggles with his faith and laments his powerlessness at the suffering he sees.

Wide-eyed and young-looking, Garfield at first seems ill-suited for the part, but soon proves himself to be a good fit. His beaming true believer enthusiasm (obliquely conjuring present-day stereotypes of Christians as faithful to a fault that, fairly or not, have taken root in our culture) is almost necessary for a narrative that takes faith so seriously. When the horrors he witnesses put that faith to the test, his torment is appreciable, whereas a more nuanced piety might have been simply drowned out by it all.

That torment and violence (less graphic than some of the director's other work, but constant and dispiriting, likely intentionally so) is the focus of around 90 percent of the picture. This is probably the most spartan film Scorsese has ever made. There’s none of the crackling editing or sequences that stand out like in his most famous films. There’s barely even any music. Despite the lush Taiwan scenery of the production, there's rarely a chance for the viewer to take it in. It’s as if the director has stripped it down as much as possible until the only thing left to counter the brutality is the character’s faith, bare and undiluted by even basic cinematic flourish.

The picture is dead serious about that faith, too. This isn’t a story interested in any ambiguity. To the lament of opponents of the “white savior” trope, the Japanese point of view is never explored; their depiction is entirely one-note, either stubbornly ruthless or as nameless victims. They exist less as characters than human faces for Garfield's trials and tribulations. He wavers a bit surrounded by such anguish, but he never doubts the righteousness of his God or his mission. And the picture accepts that he's truly doing the Lord's work as a given from the start.

Whether this approach is successful is dependent on the viewer. An audience of believers might find the film to be an ultimately uplifting story of faith against great adversity, where faith itself is the only and total reward. The less faithful may simply see a harrowing matter-of-fact depiction of a brutal chapter in history. There’s no filmmaking flair to sway the viewer for the sake of narrative; either you believe it going in or you don’t. Either way, Silence can be appreciated as an admirable work, even though it’s not a picture one really likes watching.