Five bags of popcorn

Rating: 10/10 (27 February 2018)

Silence is a beautiful, yet grueling story about a priest going through great trials of pain that test his faith. A search for a apostatized Father turns into a search for God that transcends religion due to how personal Scorsese portrays . The hope and faith that the Japanese people show towards Andrew Garfield lets me feel the beauty of being and warmth of being alive. Yet the impossibility of the task of the Japanese to truly understand the religion and the hatred shown towards priests by the Japanese rulers shows the division between what is felt within the self and the reality of the external world. Recognizing this division and accepting it is a maturation that Neeson and Garfield's characters had to go through hell to understand.
The worst parts of life on Earth consistently cause doubt in whether or not the most nebulous and beautiful tendencies of being human are real or not. Such concepts have definitely been explored before, but never as organically as with the pious manner in which Silence is portrayed. Before viewing Silence, I didn't know it was really possible to so subtly and wonderfully tell a story transcendent amongst all religions and all people around the world through religious figures, but Scorsese did it. The film's setting swims through bouts of fog, warmth and cold nothingness, mystically affecting the mood of the film.
Silence is a challenging film to watch, but pays off like nothing else. The struggle of Andrew Garfield's character through the brutality of Japan is an extreme representation of the burden beared being a human on Earth. Witnessing death for ridiculous reasons, pain, starvation and distance all due to such trivial desires and misunderstandings. In God's Silence throughout the Fathers' immense struggle, they found their Lord within them the whole time, but absent externally. This discovery was a haunting reckoning, but it showed them how no one can carve the world in their vision, and that in doing so will drive a person mad.
However unfortunate, the aspects of existence as shown in Silence are a part of human nature, and the kind of silence that Garfield and Neeson's characters maintain throughout the rest of their lives is the human equivalent to the burden Jesus bore on the cross. It's carrying the pain that's inherently going to be felt by traversing life on Earth, and realizing all that can be done is to keep what is felt within them, and express it in whatever ways possible.