More an experience than entertainment, Silence is one of those devastating masterpieces of cinema that rivet you to your seat, punish you while you watch, and leave you breathlessly humbled by its end. Martin Scorsese's newest drama ranks among his best in its technical brilliance and thematic timelessness. Understated and undermarketed, the film succeeds best by surprising us with its staggeringly ambitious scope, turning a simple story into a labyrinth of emotional and spiritual bewilderment, forcing us to engage with our own religious and moral convictions with each and every turn. Stark and cruel, the film is not one we enjoy or "like" outright, but one that cuts into your skin and stays there for you to carry long after.
We follow two 17th-century Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan to find their missing mentor (Liam Neeson) and to continue their religious mission to help the persecuted Christians there. If that sounds like an enjoyable film to you, you're in for a treat. Two and a half hours of oppressive regimes and religious colonialism include no small amount of imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and death. It's an exercise in cinematic fatalism, a sort of predestined hell we are dragged through with no promise of relenting, repentance, or even enlightenment. And that lack of promise holds true to the bitter end, where the final image could be taken as either rapturous vindication or tragically bitter irony.
Lest you think this is another Passion of the Christ-type exercise in drama-turned-exploitation, I should mention that, while brutal, the film is far more than gory body horror. It is also -- rather, primarily -- about spiritual horror, a Conradian journey to the heart of darkness. Not unlike the visceral Apocalypse Now, this film sets us immediately on a mission for God and for man, though of course we find only man. More specifically, as the title indicates, we find man with no God, or at least a God whose silence suggests a far more cruel deity than any of the torturous violence we see on screen. Indeed, you might argue, we do hear the voice of God on occasion, yet I wonder at those times if it truly is the voice of God we hear through our protagonist's mind, or if it is only his mind attempting to fill the divine void.
To be clear, it's not an anti-religious movie, an anti-Christian movie, or even an anti-Catholic movie. I suppose I've painted it as such, but that's a large part of what I got out of it. It contains enough of the opposite message to also satisfy the most imperial of religious devotees. But its meditation on the boundaries between religious piety, moral obligation, social responsibility, and humanistic integrity is so provocative, so profoundly dense, and yet so unanswered that it stands as accessible to anyone and will provide anyone exactly what they need to be challenged in their own situation. It concerns the nature of doing what is right or what is good, what is practical or prudent, what is true or necessary, and with all those lines blurred, we are left in a miasma of doubt from which Scorsese dares us to emerge stronger and better than we were before.
IMDb: Silence
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