Silence is in thrall to the spiritual crises of its two authors, novelist Shusaku Endo and filmmaker Martin Scorsese, and of its protagonist, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), a Portuguese Jesuit living in the 1600s who must either reckon with his beliefs or die for them. Despite being separated from one another by both geography and time, Endo and Scorsese feel like creative kindred spirits: Endo, a member of Japan’s third wave of postwar writers and essayists in the 1950s, explored Christian identity, and thus his identity as a Roman Catholic, through his work, much as Scorsese has grappled with his Roman Catholic background—from Mean Streets, whose protagonist is torn between his Mafioso dreams and his Catholic upbringing, to The Last Temptation of Christ—for his whole career.
So Silence, Scorsese’s big screen adaptation of Endo’s best-known text, is a well-tuned thematic union between two artists whose art dissects matters of ideology, of what it means to believe, of the cost our beliefs incur upon ourselves and our fellow believers. It’s also a taxing and unforgiving film that relentlessly interrogates Christian dogma by reshaping the Endo book into cinema, which itself reshaped real world history into literature. Both film and novel tell of how, in 1600s Japan, Japanese Christians were brutally suppressed by their government for their choice in worship, and how doomed Jesuits attempted to guide the Kakure Kirishitan (“hidden Christians”) in their time of need. Both tell of the folly of spreading the words of Christ in unfamiliar lands—lands where those words are unwelcome.
It’s rare for a movie to demand its viewers do their homework before buying a ticket, but context for Silence is a boon (though not a necessity) for comprehending the “why” of its plot’s grim particulars. The film’s source material may be historical fiction, but it’s impossible to ignore the emphasis Endo put on “historical,” perhaps because he took Silence’s history personally. Scorsese provides background for the film’s chronicle of religious persecution in its first scene, where Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson) stares wide-eyed as members of his Japanese flock are bound and tortured on the edge of a hot spring. Later, Scorsese references the Shimabara Rebellion, a peasant uprising that lasted five months and was soundly crushed by the joint armies of daimyos representing several Japanese domains.
But Silence is chiefly concerned with Garfield’s character before Neeson’s: Rodrigues, formerly a student of Ferreira’s, is determined to seek out his erstwhile teacher and verify reports of his apostasy. Upon arriving in Japan alongside fellow padre Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver), Rodrigues grows increasingly confounded by the country, its people and his god’s refusal to answer his prayers.
Silence derives its title from the last of these three bewilderments, referring to the slow, agonizing rate at which Rodrigues’s faith unravels while God remains deaf to his pleas. The Japanese government subjects its Christians to forms of punishment as cunning as they are cruel, and Rodrigues can only stand by and bear witness to their pain. Watching them suffer is how he suffers. Unlike, say, Mel Gibson, whose The Passion of the Christ gorily depicts the end of Jesus’s life in a vulgar blend of revulsion and awe, Scorsese treats the desecration of human bodies with dignity, preferring not to linger longer than he must on images of physical anguish. That, of course, is in part because he doesn’t need to: Silence’s aural component, punctuated by the wailing of the oppressed, is reminder enough of its violence when violence alone would normally suffice.
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