Apparently Martin Scorsese has wanted to make a film of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence for almost 30 years. Clearly the director, perhaps much as in his Last Temptation of Christ, is anxious to explore his own religious doubts.
As a former seminarian, Scorsese uses Silence as a way to explore that age-old problem: how does one reconcile suffering with a loving (and generally silent) God?
Thus the film follows two young 17th-century Jesuits who are anxious to go to Japan where, it has been rumoured, their former mentor Father Ferreira has apostatized. Refusing to believe it, the two men find their way to Japan with great difficulty, first landing at a village where the Christians are in hiding, fearful of being put to death but nevertheless welcoming the priests so that they can receive the sacraments.
What follows is a long and repetitive journey in which the faith of the priests, particularly that of Father Rodrigues, is put to the test as, over and over again, Christians are to be put to horrible deaths if he does not renounce his faith – something which can be done by the simple act of placing his foot on an image of Christ or Mary. Throughout his ordeal, Rodrigues prays to God to spare the Christians, to give him an answer as to why such suffering must be endured. But God remains silent.
Ostensibly, then, the film is an exploration of faith, but it is a film which offers no comforting answers. Indeed, the main thrust of the film is to be even handed. Thus the viewpoint of the Japanese is well articulated by the Inquisitor (Issei Ogata), who sees Christianity as a threat to Japanese culture. Moreover, non-believers will doubtless applaud the implication that Christians are fools for believing in God; in fact, near the end there is an explicit statement that the Japanese converts did not really understand what the missionaries were trying to teach them, so that they never really embraced true Christianity at all.
At the same time, the priests are not shown as arriving at any faith-affirming insight. In other words, this is a film about religion, rather than a film presenting a religious viewpoint. Anyone going to see it will probably not leave converted in their thinking, regardless of what they believe.
In fact many may come away from the film with only the images of torture as a permanent memory. These scenes (of which there are far too many) seem to be included only to show how cruelly inventive people can be when putting people to death. It is true that they show people willing to die hideously for their faith, but whether this will be enough to help affirm others’ belief is unlikely. Nor does the film succeed as film.
As has already been indicated, much of the film is a laboured repetition of the same scenario – a Rodrigues must either renounce his faith or Christians will die.
It is true that the film has been shot with skill and there are many inspired moments of cinematography, but they hardly make up for the laboured and wearisome narration.
In addition, Andrew Garfield as Father Rodrigues simply does not have the emotional range to convey the agony of a man caught in conflict between his human instinct and his religious belief.
Above all, it is a film that continually asks the same question without attempting to supply any answer. This may well be Scorsese’s own position, and it’s one that many people doubtless share, but it hardly requires 160 minutes of film (some of it quite horrible to look at) to recognize that faith offers no simple answers to life’s great questions; or that when one has faith, the rest of life’s problems are easily dealt with.
