In 15th Century Japan two Portuguese priests seek their apostate mentor

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2017)

Silence opens and closes on the sound of crickets. That small sound connotes silence. You only hear crickets when there is no other sound, especially not the sound of man and his cities and his machines. In the silence from man we seek the presence of God.
But there is only silence from God too. Father Rodriguez chafes at the silence of God. Without direct divine instruction man must determine — whether by logic or by faith or accident — what course of action God wants him to take.
He and Father Garupe assume it's their mission from God to go into alien and antipathetic Japan to find their mentor, Father Ferrera. They seek to disprove the charge of his apostasy. Instead they end up validating it.
Ferrera is the inadvertent cause of their mission. But he wilfully provides Rodriguez's salvation when he persuades him to join him, to perform the abandonment of Christianity and to embrace Buddhism. This gamble with their souls saves other Christians' lives. In contrast, Garupe risks his body to save other Christians' lives — and all are lost. Conclusion: the way to serve the silent invisible God is to serve humanity. Man is God's visible presence.
When Ferrera and Rodriguez serve the fugitive Christian community they have (literally) unearthed in Japan, their function is restricted to ritual, confession and the promise of a paradisal afterlife. For these promises many are tortured, killed or at best driven into a life of terror.
Kichijiro races between betrayals and confessions. The crazed animal outsider recalls the Mifune character in Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. Here he represents the power and futility of the Confession. He earnestly needs it but continually relapses into sin. His subplot scores the shallowness of the religion of ritual. It validates Ferrera's and Rodriguez's priorities when they save Christians' lives by abandoning the performance of their faith.
There are two key scenes of ambiguity. In one Rodriguez sees a vision of Jesus in the water and hears a voice advising his apostasy. Whether this is a mad hallucination (not without ample cause), the voice of God, the voice of Jesus, the voice of Ferrara — it doesn't matter. The point is he gets that radical urge, whether from within or without, and it prompts his proper service to man.
In the last shot Rodriguez is discovered in his flaming coffin to clutch his little crucifix. Within the Buddhist funeral he clings to his Christian emblem and faith. He has been vigilant not to violate his apostasy, to the point of denying Kichijiro another absolution. But in his most secret corner he retains his abandoned faith.
Incidentally, Ferrara bears the name of the count in Browning's My Last Duchess. In the poem Ferrara is a wealthy Italian Renaissance nobleman, cultured, sophisticated, aristocratic to a fault. The fault is standing on rank and privilege at the cost of feeling and humanity. He has his last duchess killed for not sufficiently respecting his status. Scorsese's Ferrera transcended his literary parallel by abandoning the letter of Christianity to serve humanity through Buddhism. Serving God through mankind is better than dis-serving humanity in the name of God.
That gives this film significant contemporary relevance. Its sometimes gruesome assault on Christianity evokes the current slaughter of Christians throughout Muslim countries, especially in the Middle East, where only Israel provides Christians and their religion freedom and support. (Of course that doesn't deter several churches and many Christians from supporting Israel's genocidal enemies instead. But that's another movie.)
The film's subject Christianity also has a broader reference. As the two heroic priests subordinate their faith to serve humanity, the Inquisitor becomes the villain for his fervour in abusing humanity to serve Buddhism. As we read today's headlines we find the film's theme and dynamic as pertinent to Islam as to Buddhism and Christianity. All religions are susceptible to abusing humanity in the name of their faith. Sad. But reformable?
The opening scene, once the darkness of the crickets has cleared, reveals a steaming smoky landscape, hilly and arid, with pools of scalding water with which to torture the believers. The 15th Century Japan setting may seem a world away from the Mean Streets of Scorses's New York parables. But the theme is the same. Like the smoking dark streets that start Taxi Driver the landscape is an inferno in which man stumbles trying to find salvation amid the temptations of both life and faith — with nary a word from any God.