Challenging start to the year's movie-going

Rating: 7/10 (7 January 2017)

My first movie of 2017 is a fairly challenging one – Martin Scorcese's 'treatise' on Faith and Apostasy in 17th-century Japan. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver play two Portuguese priests who travel to the Orient to look for a missing predecessor (Liam Neeson) and to bring comfort and sacramental rites to Catholic converts who are being persecuted and tortured by Samurai inquisitors.
Interesting to discover that Buddhism, which most of us think of as a pacifist, contemplative religion, has a history as dark and violent as that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The silence at the heart of the movie is the silence of God: does He hear the prayers of the persecuted; and does He mind if people stamp on an image of Christ to save their lives?
Apart from the harrowing scenes of torture and brutal execution, much of the film is shot in darkened rooms and daytime fogs. There are many long scenes – too many, too long – of dialogue between Garfield and the Inquisitor. There are a couple of clunky moments which attempt to echo Christ's Passion, and a Japanese 'Judas' pops into the story a little too often. Garfield gives a performance that reminded me of Montgomery Clift – that sense of tension waiting to be uncoiled. Driver's role is more physical, more heroic, less subtle. Liam Neeson relies too much on the gravitas of his presence. The last chapter in the story undermines much of the film's intensity and the final frame feels like something added as a 'sop' to today's evangelists.
Inevitably you find yourself comparing SILENCE to Roland Joffe's 1986 epic THE MISSION. Scorcese's movie arguably has more depth and definitely more debate, but THE MISSION had a 'magnificence' which SILENCE has less of – and Joffe's movie had that resonating Morricone score. SILENCE deserves points for nobility of purpose and Mr Scorcese is clearly a man of huge integrity,