SCORSESE JUST MAY MAKE A BELIEVER OUT OF YOU.
There are — if you can believe it — two movies this season that feature Andrew Garfield as a man of deep Christian faith struggling to survive in Japan. One, Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, takes place during the battle of Okinawa, near the end of the Second World War. (If it is, as its maker assures us, an antiwar movie, it is surely the most violent one ever crafted.)
The other, Silence, is set 300 years earlier, on the Japanese mainland. Garfield plays Sebastian Rodrigues, one of two Portuguese Jesuit priests who head there in 1640 in search of Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a missionary missing and feared dead — or, what might be worse, presumed to have apostatized (renounced God).
Japan in the middle years of the 17th century was not a friendly shore for Christian missionaries. The isolationist Edo period was in full swing, the religion had been outlawed, and dozens of practitioners crucified for their beliefs. Nonetheless, Rodrigues and his fellow priest Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver) are determined to find Ferreira and clear his name.
They also end up ministering to some of Japan’s secret Christians, who have been muddling along, priestless, since the last of the missionaries departed. With no one to officiate mass or hear confession, says one villager miserably, “All we can do is pray.”
Silence is a longtime passion project of its director, Martin Scorsese, who first read Shûsaku Endô’s novel of the same name in the 1980s, and originally planned the film as a followup to his controversial 1988 religious drama, The Last Temptation of Christ. But it may have a hard time connecting with his fans, being neither as provocative as The Last Temptation, nor as accessible as such recent fare as The Wolf of Wall Street or Hugo.
Stripped of its religious and philosophical trappings, mind you, the story is remarkably straightforward. Rodrigues and Garrpe find a Japanese guide, Kichijiro ( Yôsuke Kubozuka), who claims to be a Christian, although he has already renounced the religion to save his life, and will do so again — and again — before the film is out. ( At one point, between apostatizing and begging forgiveness, he bemoans his fate to have been born in a time of persecution. Without all this torture, he muses, “I would have been a great Christian.”)
They arrive in Japan but are obliged to remain in hiding, lest the Inquisitor ( Issei Ogata) find them. But when Kichijiro puts them in touch with the local Christian community, they are discovered, and the reprisals begin, including a horrific scene of crucifixion at sea, with fierce ocean waves battering believers on crosses.
Through it all, the Japanese Christians and their Portuguese priests are offered release in the form of apostasy. Just step on this symbol of Christ, their torturers tell them, and you’ll be free to go. Rodrigues tells some of the villagers to do just that, and modern audiences can be forgiven for thinking that even the priests should take that option. Surely God will know they don’t really mean it.
But there’s more going on than a simple battle of wills. In fact, Silence’s most interesting scenes are its most talkative ones, as when Rodrigues debates the Inquisitor, who views Buddhism as the lawful wife of the Japanese people, and the various stripes of Christianity, brought by the Portuguese, British, Dutch and Spanish, as concubines, squabbling over the master’s favour.
He has a point, too. Even the most pure- hearted missionaries were funded by the wealth of their respective colonial governments, all of whom were seeking to subjugate Japan or, failing that, to ally themselves with it. Godliness was never far from ethnic cleansing.
The philosophical waters get even more muddied with the eventual discovery of Ferreira. The former missionary now lives freely in Japan, teaching astronomy, medicine and anti-Christianity. He argues that the Japanese never really understood the religion anyway — slipshod translation between “Son of God” and “Sun- God” renders their faith worthless.
It’s a fascinating combination of ugly, Eurocentric thinking, religious intolerance and rationalization. It’s also, quite frankly, a pleasure to see Neeson in a role that doesn’t involve beating people up. It reminds us what a versatile actor he still can be, when released from the action genre.
Silence is very much a film of inaction and of waiting. Garfield’s character waits to be captured, waits to be released, and waits to be reunited with his fellow priest. His wily captors at one point decide that the best way to break his spirit is by feeding his body; free of immediate physical threat, he dare not renounce God, and yet he is forced to watch as others are punished for his faith. For a man determined to follow in the footsteps of Christ, this reversal of suffering is itself a form of torture.
But mostly he waits for a sign from his deity. Whether it arrives, and in what form, is very much for the individual viewer to decide. How you read it may depend in a large part on your own faith in a higher power, whether that be a Creator of everything, or merely the director of this film. If for no more than two hours and 20 minutes, Scorsese may make a believer of you. ∂∂∂
Silence opens Jan. 6 in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver; and wider on Jan. 13.