‘Silence’: A Trial of Faith, and Faith on Trial
A review of ‘Silence’, by Martin Scorsese; Paramount Pictures, 2016.
Two films with ‘silence’ in the title reviewed on consecutive days. I really should try break thing up. But here we are. Silence is an adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel of the same name. It deals with the plight of Catholic missionaries in particular and Christians in general in Japan during the Edo era. The premise is this: rumours are swirling in Portugal that Father Ferreira, played by Liam Neeson, has forsworn the faith under torture. This is a shocking and incredible claim, for Ferreira is renowned and admired for his piety. That he would disavow Holy Mother Church, even under the forms of cruel and creative torture dreamt up by the Japanese, puts the faith at risk. Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) are dispatched to find him.
They are in for a bit of a shock. The Tokugawa shogunate, who rose to power in 1603, rule the country according to a policy of strict isolation. All foreign influences are to be stamped out, and Christianity, which was introduced by St. Francis Xavier in the mid-16th century, is seen as an especially grave threat to the ruling social order. Accordingly, the government treat Christians brutally. To test whether someone is Christian or not, those in charge will subject him to fumi-e, which entails stamping on an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary. If he refuses, he is subjected to — for example — ana-tsurushi: hung upside down over a pit, sometimes for days, with his head partially submerged in excrement and a small incision made behind one ear to prevent him dying quickly.
To test whether someone is Christian or not, those in charge will subject him to fumi-e, which entails stamping on an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary.
Lovely stuff. This (or worse) is the fate that awaits our churchly heroes if they fail, as it were, to watch their backs. But they press on. Rodrigues and Garupe are soon split up. Rodrigues tries to minister to the Christian underground, going deeper and deeper into hiding as he does. More and more, his faith is tested. How can God let His believers live in such squalid and inhuman circumstances? How can He let them suffer in this way? And how, throughout all of this, can He remain silent? Why won’t He show himself?
Silence is, of course, the heart of the matter. The silence of God, yes — the God whose seeming absence vexes and unsettles Rodrigues; but also the God who fills the silence that stands for answers that are not forthcoming with moral certainties. ‘What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed?’ asks the narrator of Beckett’s The Unnamable. ‘By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? Generally speaking. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless.’ In the work of Beckett, God is always absent. For Rodrigues, however, God has suddenly gone missing.
Silence is, of course, the heart of the matter. The silence of God— the God whose seeming absence vexes and unsettles Rodrigues.
How does one render such emotional and moral complexity on screen? How does one do so without resorting to the tackiness of explicit disclosure through dialogue or narration, the diary or letter? One way is by hiring Andrew Garfield, whose expressive features communicate so much. Another is by leaning, despite their shortcomings, on those means of explicit disclosure. Rodrigues does write letters in which he relates his inner turmoil though, mercifully, this is not overdone. As for the cinematography, the whole thing is beautifully shot, thanks to Rodrigo Prieto, and there is next to nothing by way of the score. The film is in some sense, ‘naked’, with none of the swagger and machismo of the typical Scorsese flick.
Still, it is missing something. Perhaps it is just tricky, as a viewer, to square a pragmatic outlook (for goodness’ sake, Rodrigues, just renounce your faith and say later you didn’t mean it) with the purity of belief and integrity of the characters on which the whole film hangs. Scorsese, presumably, did and does not find this tough. I read somewhere that this was a real labour of love for him. He liked Endō’s book a great deal. He consulted his spiritual director prior to adapting it. In 2009, he tried very hard to make the film happen (with Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio del Toro and Gael García Bernal starring) but the project fell apart, presumably because it has absolutely no box office appeal. It is a delicious little irony, really, that only the $392 million taken by The Wolf of Wall Street, a festival of excess and depravity, enabled Scorsese to make this amusingly unfashionable film about a trial of faith, and faith’s being put on trial, in 17th-century Japan.
