Review of Silence (2017) by Matt C — 16 Nov 2017

Scorsese is a director that I've never happened to fall in love with. He's one that makes several good choices in each movie and demonstrates unmistakable talent, which makes his disagreeable decisions all the more frustrating--this reached its height with The Wolf of Wall Street, which I still find to be bad.

Silence exemplifies again why I just can't help but label Scorsese as overrated. It's a movie that takes a lot of strengths--very good performances, technical craftsmanship, great cinematography, interesting moral questions--and then dilutes them all over its 161-minute runtime until the final product is average and a despairing reminder of its unfulfilled potential.

Based on Sh?saku End?'s 1966 novel, it's set in the 1600s and follows Andrew Garfield as a Portuguese--uh, yeah right--priest named Sebastião Rodrigues who goes to Japan with fellow priest Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) to look for Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has gone missing.

Christians are being prosecuted by Japanese Buddhists in the forms of torture and execution if they don't denounce their own faith, and Rodrigues tried to cling to his beliefs without compromising his own or others' lives.

Being a Scorsese movie, the positives more or less go without saying. The film looks fantastic with Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography making great use of lighting and symmetry at the right moments along with extensive uses of fog, smoke, and steam.

The movie's tone is fittingly oppressive and largely consistent, and the movie lacks music for a majority of its runtime, which I found to be an interesting and inspired choice. Between this and Hacksaw Ridge, Garfield solidifies his talents as a serious actor and generally redeemed himself of the fact that he's not at all Portuguese in the slightest--he's like living English mayonnaise.

Similar to the fact that the positives don't require a ton of writing about, the negative aspects of Silence aren't that plentiful, but instead pervasive enough to have a similarly notable effect.

That, again, is the pacing of the movie. I wouldn't necessarily call the movie repetitive because there is a sense of forward momentum to the narrative a majority of the time, but the journey to the end didn't have to be this drawn-out.

In fact, the ending is led up to by interesting character arcs that I won't spoil, but some sequences felt unnecessary and like the same material dealt with in different manners but to diminishing effect.

Despite the conflicts involving our protagonist, it's a bit annoying that a priest is so oblivious to how similar his situation and struggles are to that of Jesus Christ's, and if he were just a smarter character, I feel like the ending would have been reached far quicker.

For every scene that the film is able to wring tension out of stagnant conversations and inaction, there's a scene that just made me focus on how much my ass started to hurt because of the movie's duration.

Silence is a well made, interesting movie, but it's one that's more admirable than enjoyable or recommendable. It's unfortunate that I was happy to leave the theater because there are scenes that are great, but I was bored too much to say that I actually liked Silence.

Some of Scorsese's choices are great and some aren't and Garfield and Neeson's acting overshadow the questionable-at-times performance from Driver, but overall, that isn't quite enough.

6.1/10, okay, C+, average, etc.