There are several fruitful hermeneutics with which to approach Silence: as accurate historical fiction, as a commentary on colonialism, as a text in the sub-discipline of philosophy of religion or from the perspective of cinematic history. All of the approaches are enriched by cinematography capturing austere landscapes, lush, texture-rich shots of Japanese material culture and the agonized faces of three priests facing an impossible choice. Regardless of a viewer’s lens in approaching the film, Silence provides a punch to the gut for anyone who takes it seriously.
Silence captures the early state-building efforts of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which arose in the first decade of the seventeenth century and worked to unify Japan around a celebration of what was “uniquely” Japanese as a way to consolidate its grip on power. This meant an extreme isolation that pushed away all Europeans except the Dutch, who had to follow extraordinarily strict rules to be allowed to conduct trade in Japan. The Tokugawa Shogunate’s choice was of truly world-historical importance, as preventing European ships from stopping there to trade for silver led to the collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty and, eventually, the growth of the illegal opium trade from British India to Qing China in the 1800s, European colonization of China (hello, Hong Kong) and therefore to Bruce Lee.
Silence is not concerned with matters of global geopolitics or the triangular trade, but rather with the implications of the Shogunate’s mania for “traditional” Japanese ideas on the nascent Christian community on the islands. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to arrive in Japan, typically brought missionaries aboard their merchant vessels, with the result that Portuguese Catholicism developed a modest presence in Japan by the time the Tokugawas established their control. To assert their authority and stamp out foreign ideas, the new rulers of Japan employed some of the most brutal executions-by-ordeal in world history, assaulting Christianity with extreme cruelty. This is the subject of Silence: the agonizing ordeal, both physically, emotionally and spiritually, of the intrepid Portuguese Jesuits who had to decide what it meant to practice the faith in such a context and the hapless converts to their persecuted religion.
The film’s protagonist is Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), who has insisted he be sent to Japan to seek out his former mentor, Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has supposedly abandoned the faith and adopted Japanese customs. What proceeds is a long, multifaceted meditation on translation, imperialism and sacrifice. The film moves seamlessly between three lenses. First are the epic landscapes of samurai Japan, straight from the post-war films of Mizoguchi. Second comes the intense inner dialogues between Rodrigues and his God, quoting scripture and often shot in extreme close-up, evoking Bergman’s masterful God Trilogy. Finally, connecting both of these strands and forming the structural skeleton of the whole film is the great fable of European colonialism: Heart of Darkness. Rodrigues has gone to the far side of the world, plunged himself into a foreign land he neither knows nor understands and hopes to uncover the truth of rumors about one of his countrymen and predecessors. It is Scorsese doing Conrad while gesturing to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Few films are as imbricated into cinema history as this one.
The final act of Silence is truly a dissertation in philosophy of religion. Whether Rodrigues (and/or Ferreira) are heroes or cowards depends on how each viewer interprets their motives. Like Bergman’s Winter Light, Silence is deeply troubled by the words Jesus uttered in the Gospel According to Matthew, a recitation of an ancient Hebrew poem first recorded in the Bible in the Book of Psalms: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” At the very moment of apotheosis, the ardent believer realizes that s/he has never been more distant from God. It is a commentary on sacrifice, certainly, but it also begs questions about the true intent and power of the Christian God. What kind of God abandons his most faithful servants to the most horrible fate? What kind of religion results from such a God? It is rare in Scorsese’s oeuvre that he tackles such fundamental questions and he never does so as frankly as he does here in Silence.
In the end, Silence is a film about fidelity to ideals and oneself, about the price of arrogance in pursuit of one’s goals when met with the constraints of the real world and about the power of cinema itself. In this way, it is every bit as much a signature Scorsese film as Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street and Raging Bull, even if it is anomalous in being set in seventeenth-century Edo Japan.
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