Movie Review: 'Silence'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's about religion, but Silence pulsates with violence.
Which should be no surprise, given that it's the latest film from world-class director Martin Scorsese, among whose abiding themes and artistic preoccupations down through the years have been spirituality (Kundun, The Last Temptation of Christ) and violence (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York).
That is, more often than not, he trains his cameras on the profane. But sometimes – and this is one of those times – he addresses the sacred.
This is personal filmmaking, but on a very large scale.
A dream-like historical drama about martyrdom and redemption, and a pet project that was years in the making, Silence is based on a Japanese novel about faith and religion that provided the basis for a Japanese film in 1971.
It's set in the seventeenth century, when two Jesuit priests, Sebastiao Rodigues and Francisco Garrpe, missionaries played respectively by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, travel from Portugal and smuggle themselves into Japan to spread the gospel of Christianity and locate their mentor, Father Ferreira, a Portugese Jesuit priest played by Liam Neeson, who is rumored to have "apostatized" – renounced his Christian beliefs.
On their secret mission to support Japanese Christians hiding from government persecution during this clash between cultures, they encounter severe persecution themselves because of their beliefs. This from the government authorities in newly unified Japan who want to do nothing less than purge the nation of Christianity entirely.
And if that means tormenting or torturing Christian believers, so be it.
Scorsese, who won the Academy Award as Best Director for The Departed and was nominated for the same award eight other times, is interested in using the source material, a 1966 novel of historical fiction by Shusaku Endo, and the screenplay that he co-adapted with Jay Cocks (who also co-wrote Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ) to explore such weighty themes as sacrifice, God's deafening silence in the face of extensive human suffering, and the tireless search for divine guidance among the devout.
Scorsese, who has described himself as a "believer with some doubts," presents this as yet another struggle with faith, a theme he has visited in many of his films.
This time out, he offers us an austere, lengthy (over 2-1/2 hours) meditation as a gamble on the faith and patience of his audience, and he does little in the way of streamlining his narrative or avoiding repetitiousness or hurrying things along or exponentially increasing the urgency. Consequently, the level of pure emotional engagement we seek – and, undoubtedly, Scorsese seeks for us – is wanting.
Oh, there's a spot of comic relief here and there. But not enough to leaven the material.
Scorsese 's mastery of the technical elements prevents any movie he makes from becoming a slog, and this one is well acted and never less than visually striking.
But it comes dangerously close to overstaying its welcome and taking on the form of an endurance test.
Maybe that's the idea.
Which is fine, except that on a certain level, it seems that Scorsese has left his audience out of the formula this time, and his film, however impressive it might be, is just too one-dimensional to hold up over its excessive running time.
Far too often, we find ourselves observing and, yes, appreciating, but not necessarily feeling or caring.
So we'll pray for 3 stars out of 4. This Silence may not quite be golden. But at times it's close. And yet, while admiring almost everything about it, we still find ourselves, more than once and uncharacteristically for a Scorsese film, wishing it would be over and feeling downright guilty about that.
