Martin Scorsese’s Strained “Silence”

The heroes of the new Martin Scorsese film, “Silence,” make a brief stop in Macau before heading on to their rendezvous with fate. James Bond did much the same, in “Skyfall,” but there the comparison ends, since the travellers in “Silence” visit no high-end casino, collect no earnings, and meet no mysterious dame with a Beretta Model 70 strapped to her thigh. Temptations are plentiful, in Scorsese’s tale, but they come in other forms.

The heroes are two Jesuit priests, Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Garrupe (Adam Driver), who are on their way to Japan. They hail from Portugal, although you might not immediately guess as much from their speech; should you wish to be charitable (and the movie is designed to kindle the conscience), you would describe Rodrigues’s accent as itinerant—it wanders freely between, say, Amsterdam and Trieste, seeking sanctuary where it may. The time is the sixteen-forties, and the priests, “an army of two,” have been dispatched by their superior, Father Valignano (Ciarán Hinds), in search of Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson)—an older man, once a mentor to Rodrigues and now the subject of scarcely credible rumors. Some time ago, he went to Japan, to minister to thousands of Christian believers; word has now come, however, that he has apostasized—forsaken the faith that bore him to that country in the first place.

A gruesome prelude, set in 1633 and unveiled at the start of the film, gives some clue as to why this dismaying hearsay might be true. We watch Ferreira on his knees, at the limits of his fortitude, looking on as a group of his fellow-priests are tortured by their Japanese oppressors. Each priest, clad only in a loincloth, is tied to posts, while water from a natural spring, hot enough to boil the skin, is ladled over him; holes in the ladle produce a fine rain, prolonging the torment. Such is the chastisement—a true Imitatio Christi, an emulation of Christ, even of his suffering on the cross—that awaits you, as a Christian in the Japan of that period, when you refuse to renounce your beliefs. If Ferreira’s spirit has indeed been crushed by the promise of such pain, who could blame him?

“Silence” is long, twenty minutes shy of three hours, and the bulk of it—too much—is consumed with the travails of Rodrigues and Garrupe, and then of Rodrigues alone, in a place that seems increasingly hostile not just to their calling but to their very existence. The Christian communities that they come across are poor and petrified, worshipping in secret, often after dark: shades of the catacombs, where believers used to meet in the earliest days of the faith. That echo of antiquity is deepened, in cruel fashion, when one of the young priests is betrayed, for a bagful of silver. As the coins drop and chime, we think of Judas, although the Judas in this case is a compulsive traitor, Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), first encountered as a soiled drunk, who spends the movie lurching from bravado to a cringing cowardice, no sooner selling his soul than returning, like a whipped animal, in repentant shame.

We need his frantic indecision, because much of the film comes dangerously close to feeling stalled or stuck. Rodrigues goes from one village to another before being captured by the Christian-hunting authorities, caged, and put to the test—not with torture but with interrogations and taunts. Throughout all this, the focus is very much on Garfield, and on his open young face, so easily stirred to tears or lamentation. There are pageants of cruelty on view, as the faithful are hung on crosses and planted at the sea’s brink, so that the tide will rise and lash them into submission and a drenching death; others, while still alive, are bundled in straw and either incinerated or casually tipped overboard; nastiest of all is the plight of those who are shrouded and suspended upside down, with a careful nick in their necks, so that the blood will not go to their heads but drip downward. Thus, they are kept unfainting and awake. What binds the scenes together is Rodrigues, bearing witness and—so he hopes and prays—sharing in the anguish of his flock. With a couple of exceptions, however, we never know the sufferers’ names. What matters, the film insists, is the interior drama of the priest.

But it must be asked: Is Scorsese the man for the interior? Is “Silence” fit to stand beside Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest,” or Bergman’s “Winter Light”? It remains to be seen whether moviegoers who thrilled to the kinetic flourishes of “GoodFellas” and “Casino” will tolerate, or even recognize, a Scorsese hero who refuses to strike back. The agon of the central character, self-besieged or plagued by circumstance, runs through the history of the director’s films, as does the suspicion that man’s brutality to man may have a penitential purpose. As the warden of an asylum for the criminally insane says to Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), in “Shutter Island,” “God loves violence.” The discussion continues:

WARDEN: Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It’s what we are. We wage war, we burn sacrifices, and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers. And why? Because God gave us violence to wage in his honor.
TEDDY: I thought God gave us moral order.
WARDEN: There’s no moral order as pure as this storm. There’s no moral order at all. There’s just this: Can my violence conquer yours?

That is Scorsese’s battlefield, the one that was first laid out for us in “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” with substantial assistance from Paul Schrader, who wrote the first and contributed to the second. Together, he, Scorsese, and Robert De Niro built up portraits of men on the move—of Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta, bearing their own storms with them wherever they went. It was as if they were picking a fight with God, to get Him worked up, and there was a roiling of guilt in their guts, and of expiatory wrath (LaMotta ends by throwing punches and percussive growls at a mirror), that seemed to me more plausible, and more physically redolent of spiritual strife, than anything that contorts the features of Father Rodrigues. Hence the embarrassing moment during which they are reflected in a stream, and undergo a rippling transformation into the face of Christ; as a special effect, the change is almost tacky, but it also suggests a movie that, lacking in momentum, is straining a little too hard.

I missed Schrader’s combative touch in “Silence,” which is written by Scorsese and Jay Cocks. And I missed Liam Neeson, too, who, after his initial appearance, disappears for a couple of hours. When he does show up once more, aged and weathered, he takes immediate and complete command of the action. Here, you think, staring at his oaken frame and hearing the gentle but implacable burr of his voice—for Neeson, like Sean Connery, need not bother himself with accents—is the evidence that the movie has sought. Here is what a person truly looks like after years of struggle. Ferreira is like one of those sites—now calm and hallowed, but riven with exhaustion—where a terrible clash of arms took place long ago, and you realize that what “Silence” badly required, in the role of Rodrigues, was a younger Neeson. (Some of the most memorable priests on film are the most solid and the least refined: Jean-Paul Belmondo, in “Léon Morin, Priest,” for example, and Gérard Depardieu, in “Under Satan’s Sun.”) That is not Garfield’s fault; he was excellent as another believer, in Mel Gibson’s “Hacksaw Ridge,” but that film drew on Garfield’s country-boy innocence, and gradually stripped it away as his character was caught in the maulings of war. No such development occurs in “Silence,” where Garfield has to be stricken from start to finish. Of the two movies, Scorsese’s is infinitely the subtler and more elegantly wrought, patient and pensive where Gibson opts for pugnacity, yet “Hacksaw Ridge” exerts something—a basic grip on the audience, tugging at our nerves and our desire to forge ahead—that “Silence” cannot quite muster.

Another figure, aside from the priests, compels attention. He possesses the Dostoevskyan title of the Inquisitor (Issey Ogata), and it is he who questions the imprisoned Rodrigues, and politely probes for the weak spots in the Jesuit’s moral constitution. This is done largely in English, with a toothy smile and a curious intonation, high-pitched and long-vowelled; as intended, the flutter of comedy in Ogata’s performance makes him more rather than less sinister, and some of the penalties that are meted out on his orders—not to Rodrigues but to his fellow-Christians—are irredeemably grim. Heretically, however, and unforgivably, I gazed at Ogata and thought of Alfred E. Neuman, on the cover of Mad magazine, and from that instant the Inquisitor held no further terrors for me; one drawback of a movie as frowningly serious as “Silence” is that it demands a straight face and dares you, on pain of Lord knows what retribution, to drop the mask. Certainly, there is no mistaking the pivot of the plot, as a foot is lowered toward a graven image of Jesus; trample on him, the film has demonstrated, and you commit apostasy. Some of the devout have already done so. Others have resisted the lure, and paid the price. So, what will Father Rodrigues choose to do? Scorsese gives everything to the moment: a closeup, a puff of earthly dust in slow motion, and, yes, an unbreakable silence. Hold your breath for a second, before this rarest of phenomena: a film as quiet as a tomb.

Needless to say, this being a Scorsese project, there is no want of visual wealth. On the contrary, we are given passages of sustained beauty, and the compositional sense could not be more exact. Look at the caves, sometimes graced by a flickering torchlight, in which the priests take refuge when they first come ashore in Japan; at the green slopes, rising and falling like waves, over which they toil on their quest; and at the fogs and mists that drift through the movie, as densely confounding as anything that Kurosawa summoned for “Throne of Blood,” his Japanese rereading of “Macbeth.” Inserted into this grandeur, with relentless skill, is its opposite—closeups so extreme that we can trace the arcs of dirt beneath individual fingernails. More often than not, we see a cross, of wood or plaited straw, clasped within these palms: a pitifully humble thing, but invested with such meaning that merely to own it could get you slain, or save your immortal soul.

Hence the final shot of the movie, set during a funeral. The camera ushers us inside the coffin—not a rectangular box but an amazing drumlike cylinder, clearly not Christian, in which the corpse is seated, and which is soon set alight. We peer into the body’s folded hands, and guess what we find? The image is doubly devotional. Scorsese is insisting on the lifelong urge to keep faith with God, but, equally, no film director can delve into a conflagration to find a single object—trusted and mislaid, though never forgotten—and not pay tribute to the end of “Citizen Kane,” where the sled once belonging to the young Charlie Kane is casually tossed into a furnace. What the maker of “Silence” does or does not believe must remain, of course, a matter between him and the Almighty, but, in regard to the transcendent power of cinema, all of Scorsese’s doubts just fade away. Rosebud is his cross.