nope

Rating: 8/10 (16 January 2017)

As someone who became a "cineaste" in my tweens, I can say that Scorsese was first a God, then, in film school, a bloated pre-madonna, and now, as a middle aged film-lover, a damn fine, if over-celebrated film maker.
This is one of the best films he's ever made, which is not to call it a truly a great movie. Aesthetically, it's breathtaking. The imagery is probably the finest Scorsese has ever conjured. He and DP Rodrigo Prieto create pictures worthy of far greater artists, like Tarkovsky or Van Gogh.
Thematically, it's a hard piece of work for a proud atheist like myself to swallow. It's a celebration of religious faith as such. However, despite the overtly spiritual, Christian nature of this work, it fits right into Scorsese's oeuvre, one that has been, at times in my life, inspirational to me. Are not Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas all about an inner, obsessive drive to live up to a presupposed ideal? In all those cases the ideal reached turns out to be an empty goal, a false target.
In this work, as I experience it, the empty ideal is the Christian faith, one that, the film makes clear in the most visceral of ways, has claimed many victims, in the service of both "proving and disproving" its dogma. But for Scorsese to be human is to carry obsession into the realm of violence, against both the self and the other.
One of the strengths of Silence is how it plays out as a conversation between sincere missionaries and ruthless, if clear sighted, anti- imperialists. The film makers intend you to identify with the former, but I did so with the latter. That never blinded me to the fact that both sides were making compelling arguments. I do think the film wants the viewer to take both into consideration, and for that alone it is commendable.