Review of Silence (2016) by Greg C — 19 Jan 2017

This may or may not be a Scorsese masterwork. It brought to mind bellwether films of a similar genre: The Mission starting Robert DeNiro, and The Last Samurai starting Tom Cruise and Ken Watenabe. Here we have an unflinching examination of faith.

Andrew Garfield is our tortured priest in the crucible. I was actually captivated by the Japanese characters of lapsed-Christian played by Shin'ya Tsukamoto and the chief inquisitor played by Issei Ogata.

They are rich and interesting characters and unlike anything that I can recall. There is a question in my mind about whether suffering is built into the DNA of Christianity. If Christians aren't perceiving of themselves as a population under large scale death threat, would they have a raison d'etre? Shot for shot, the movie is visually flawless, so kudos got to DP Rodrigo Prieto.

In term of sound, Director Scorsese makes a bold choice by giving this movie almost no musical score for its entire length and end credits. We are left with the noises of nature in the 1600s, the interactions of bodies with water and wood.

We stew in the discomfort it creates. There is an odd lack of self-awareness in a movie where all the Portuguese parts are spoken in English by Americans, Brits or Irishmen. (The Japanese is subtitled).

It is telling of the ego of the west in dealing with other parts of the world. In the 17th century that imperial arm was old Europe. Now it is the US. And the inquisitor schools us. "The price of your glory is their suffering".