One small step for mankind

Rating: 9/10 (31 January 2017)

For the last Martin Scorsese cinematic outing, audiences were graced with a drooling Jonah Hill waggling rubber genitalia across the screen. If a more abrupt paradigm shift exists than Silence, Scorsese's solemn passion project exploring faith, suffering, and the ethics of martyrdom, I dare you to find it. Taking a fair share of cues from Ingmar Bergman, and with nary a jaunty rock tune in sight, Silence completes Scorsese's spirituality triptych (following Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ) not with a roar, but an appropriately introspective whisper. The clue is in the title, and Scorsese's latest work, though imperfect, stands among his most raw, yearning, powerful, and gruesomely beautiful.
Charting the tormented journey of two Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan in search of their disappeared, disgraced mentor, Silence plays somewhere between The Last Temptation of Christ and Apocalypse Now, but is somehow bleaker than both. Before Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe (Garfield and Driver) have even left their monastery for Japan, they are already scrutinized by Scorsese's penetrating high angle tracking shots, like a literal eye of God surveilling them forebodingly. Upon their arrival in Japan (which Scorsese cloaks in perennial stylized mists, a transparent visual metaphor for the ethical and spiritual cloudiness to follow), Rodrigues and Garupe are already immediately in jeopardy. They are found by a sect of closeted Japanese Christians who cling to worshipping them with an almost manic desperation, only to repeatedly watch these followers be gruesomely tortured to death by the Japanese authorities, too recalcitrant to apostatize (publicly renouncing their faith) in front of the helpless priests. Here, Scorsese establishes the film's core thematic tension: martyrdom aside, at what point are the benefits of spiritual dogmatism outweighed by the collateral suffering and deaths of those whose lives it is meant to save?
The latter half of the film is devoted to interrogating (pun intended) this question in more solemn detail. It's a gruelling, but also distressingly timely watch, and Scorsese, while stopping short of the torture-porn extremes of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, doesn't shirk on graphic imagery in detailing the agonizing torment individuals are willing to espouse and governments are willing to inflict in the name of religious dissonance. Navigating the tricky subject matter, Scorsese is (largely) careful to deconstruct his narrative's implicit colonialism, while (mostly) steering clear of its perilous potential for Orientalist othering. A more balanced take would linger less with Father Rodrigues' steadfast Christian conviction, and grant more of a voice to the Japanese Buddhists, to have their vehement rejection of external Christianity play with more context than outright tyranny (the fact that Buddhism is itself an import religion to Japan is a cruel irony the film leaves untouched). One fleeting sequence, where Scorsese's surrogate Pontius Pilate, the Japanese anti-Christian inquisitor (Issey Ogata, whose flamboyant preening is perfectly malevolent and curiously funny) rebuts why he avidly resists the encroaching Christianity in his land, is one of the film's most fascinating moments, temporarily playing the film more as debate and less as diatribe. Ultimately, Scorsese is less interested in the polemic of missionary politics and colonialism than Rodrigues' own spiritual journey, but there's still the lingering unease of the tale begetting a Letters to Iwo Jima style counterpoint to fully tell the story.
Focalizing the story through Garfield's Father Rodrigues proves a risky endeavour, as his earnest-turned-agonizingly-unrequited prayer-narration initially grates to the point of prodding the patience of even the most faithful Scorsese devotees (a fact not helped by his ludicrously unconvincing Portuguese accent, though Driver fares little better, while Neeson is evidently disinterested in even attempting one). There are many moments when we yearn for the title to have been obeyed somewhat more literally, as Garfield's voice-over threatens to detract from the stunning Taipei scenery. Even with Scorsese's never-steadier directorial hand lending the film a lethal calm and perennial throb of threat, two and a half fairly plodding hours with an existential Garfield tests viewer bladder capacity to the utmost.
Then, halfway through, Scorsese finally shows his hand with a cunning turning point: we finally realize Rodrigues' obsession with the spiritual glory of martyrdom isn't meant to play as sympathetic. Suddenly, images of the looming face of Christ he fixates upon begin to play as cruelly ironic, if not outright contemptible, just as his increasing refusal to apostatize plays as increasingly selfish in the face of the multitudes of Japanese devotees dying to protect him. It's a bold reversal, and only successful thanks to Garfield's fearlessly human performance. His willingness to fully embrace and embody Rodrigues' flaws allow him to glide effortlessly from his early chirpily boyish, but somewhat short-sighted devotion, to his later defeated, muted husk of a man with surprising subtlety and enigmatic dissociation. By flirting with being so inaccessible, Garfield crafts one of the most unexpectedly haunting performances of the year.
Similarly, Adam Driver's cracking voice and emaciated body embody Garupe's misery and doubt with remarkably visceral power. As the resident Kurtz, Liam Neeson employs his hangdog face and gravelly, sonorous tones to project unfathomable depths of defeat and bitterness, all the more stirring when his tempting words of corruption begin to make increasing, tragic sense. Still, it's Yōsuke Kubozuka as the Gollum-like Kichijiro, Scorsese's most recent Judas surrogate, who delivers the most fascinating emotional arc. Guided by Kubozuka's petulant charisma, Kichijiro's perennial betrayals and repentances transition from numbingly tragic to slapstick humour and back again with alarming effortlessness, making him a pathetic but unforgettable creation.
Beautiful, searing, and achingly soulful, Silence poses profound, challenging questions, while remaining frequently teasingly enigmatic about the answers. While not quite reaching the formal perfection and blistering resonance of many of Scorsese's earlier classics, as religious persecution continues to proliferate in the contemporary world, a film so fearlessly prescient should be considered troubling, but essential, unforgettable viewing. Just don't be surprised for the film's title to prove prophetic for the state of its audiences afterwards.
-8.5/10