God and humanity: Scorsese at his deepest

Rating: 9/10 (17 March 2017)

I had quite distorted expectations towards this film. One review I scarcely read called it a "sado-maso flick with priests". And, considering Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield's sleazy mugs, I was almost expecting some perverse variation of 50 Shades of you know what. Well, truth be told, I have never been so wrong in my life.
Silence is a story of two Jesuit priests from Portugal, who go to Christianity-intolerant XVII century Japan to discover the fate of their mentor. That's basically all the story on the surface. Beneath it, though, it's a journey much more profound and mind-provoking. A journey that, depending on how deep you're able to analyze the topic, might make you ponder whether religion is a virus that cares solely about spreading, whether the only thing multiple religions produce is people's suffering, whether your high spiritual beliefs and principles are worth letting people die, whether faith really needs the tangible symbolics, and whether god actually cares about people, or the only thing he cares about is being worshiped properly. And that's just the obvious philosophical and theological concepts Silence reaches for, and if you wanna look harder you might find even more food for thought here.
Seriously, this is not a film you would wanna watch in a movie theater. Besides two and a half hours of its running time, I spent at least another hour for just pausing and debating over what's going on and what do those actions imply with the person next to me, sometimes digressing from the film's context towards the universal concepts of humanity and civilization evolution. And that rich ground for discussion, something way beyond the scope of a mere review, is probably the most impressive of Silence's achievements.
Still, this film is not just its story, which is primarily a merit of the book the film is based on. It's the way that story is told. And I don't know what kind of cinema magic Scorsese put in here, but he has managed to do an almost undoable job: make the film clearly speak to you between the lines, conveying the most complex and confusing and even intimidating topics and concepts without saying much out loud. The silence that finally revealed to Rodrigues the voice of God is probably the same silence in which we can hear everything that this film has to say, and more. It may sound silly or trivial, but trust me: it's no small feat to raise topics of such magnitude - and make them obviously relevant to our turbulent world of today where people kill and die in the name of various gods every day - without being cryptic like Umberto Eco or pop and glossy like Dan Brown. My only complaint about Silence is its ending, opting out of the open interpretation and thus losing the precious ambiguity and at the same time the philosophical potential of such, but otherwise what Mr Scorsese did out here is nothing short of divine, whether you believe in god or not.