Silence (R16)
161 mins A few years back, Martin Scorsese released The Wolf of Wall Street, and while punters enjoyed its lavish, lascivious portrayal of greed and misogyny, I was disappointed in Uncle Marty. The man whose Goodfellas and Casino will always rest in my top 10 favourite films has a clear and unabashed propensity for embracing the darker side of human nature, and I’m fine with that, but Wolf felt so gratuitous and slimy as to be unworthy of his sublime cinematic skills.
Scorsese follows that up with 2016’s Silence, which couldn’t be more different in timbre and topic, and it’s pleasing to report that the master maintains his filmmaking flair while devoting his soul to a message much more affecting and important.
For Scorsese, the career Catholic, Silence has been a passion project since he read the source novel on a train travelling through Japan nearly three decades ago.
It’s taken a long time to get to the screen, but it’s clear from the mesmerising opening scenes, as three Jesuit priests anxiously discuss the disappearance of their fellow padre (Liam Neeson) in the wilderness of Japan, that all care has been taken to instil this aptly-titled film with a gravitas and beauty befitting its underlying rhetorical question: Does the difference in our faiths matter, or is merely having faith what’s important?
Two young bucks of the Hollywood system are the surprising leads, and play the pivotal roles – Adam Driver (recently heralded as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the titular Paterson), and Andrew Garfield – himself up for an Oscar next week for leading Mel Gibson’s harrowing Hacksaw Ridge. The two are superb, embodying the earnest devotion of young missionaries who initially believe that adherence to their Christian faith will conquer all, only to discover how far the Japanese will go to purge their country of this Western religious scourge. Losing kilos as the light dims in their eyes, the priests rapidly realise the locals’ faith (or lack of it) will not be broken or converted. But how much will the padres suffer before their own faith is stripped away?
Playing Portuguese priests from a bygone era (mid-1600s), the principal actors speak with inoffensive accents, which are crucially not laughable or mocking; similarly the Japanese cast members speak in English with their native tone.
The epistolary voiceover leads us neatly from Father Ferreira’s (Neeson) final message through Rodrigues and Garupe’s torturous expedition to find and bring him home. You can sense that throughout the making of the film, everything was treated with utmost respect and dedication; Garfield, for one, went so far as to undertake the preparations to become a Jesuit priest in order to immerse himself in the role.
As you would expect from a man who frames all his films so exquisitely (even the gratuitously violent ones), Scorsese honours the story with magnificent photography, from stunning overheads to long shots, which allow us to witness devastating cruelty as helpless bystanders.
Thematically, Silence is reminiscent of The Mission and the more recent Of Gods and Men, both excellent treatises on holding faith in the most difficult circumstances.
It’s frequently very moving, admirably without the film having to resort to emotional manipulation (there is hardly any soundtrack at all, Scorsese having opted for earth and wind sounds over music).
By the end of the often-harrowing two-and-a-half-hours, you may have an epiphany of your own. - Sarah Watt