Martin Scorsese is best known for making violent, high-octane movies such as Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. Yet when he chooses to turn down the volume, the results can be “astounding”, said Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out. So it is with his latest film, a stirring parable about religious faith under pressure, set in 17th century Japan. Based on an acclaimed novel by Shusaku Endo, Silence is intense, slow-burning, and – though totally devoid of humour –utterly compelling. It is Scorsese’s “most mature” movie to date, and it begs comparison with Ingmar Bergman’s masterworks. That is to say, “it ranks among the greatest achievements of spiritually minded cinema”. The film’s title refers to the response of God – or rather the bewildering lack of it – to the brutal oppression meted out by
the Japanese religious authorities to Christian converts, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. It is this absence of divine intervention, more than the horrors of torture itself, that appals the two Portuguese missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who have journeyed to Japan in search of their missing mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Garfield and Driver deliver unimprovable performances, the former glowing with goodness, the latter slightly creepy in his devotion. As you’d
expect, Scorsese “doesn’t flinch” from the graphic depiction of violence, said Ian Freer in Empire. We see men drowned and women burned alive. Yet such is the skill of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, even these images acquire an almost “poetic” quality.
The director, who himself once nurtured ambitions to enter the priesthood, reportedly spent 28 years trying to get this project off the ground, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. So after all that effort, nobody dared to cough politely and say: “Marty, it could lose a chunk here and there.” More’s the pity: it would have been a much better film had they done so. The final clash between Garfield and a “tremendously powerful” Neeson is wholly absorbing, but it’s a slog getting there. The film is “punishingly long”, agreed Nigel Andrews in the FT. And it doesn’t help that Driver and Garfield address the Japanese characters in Portuguese-accented pidgin English (which is meant to signal that they’re speaking to them in pidgin Portuguese). The mid-section, though illuminated by flashes of brilliance from Issey Ogata as a ruthless inquisitor, is especially gruelling. There’s no denying that Silence is hard work, said Allan Hunter in the Daily Express. But this “long, uncompromising and heavyweight” movie will “stay with you long after more accessible, crowd-pleasing films” have faded. If you’ve an appetite for “rich, complex cinema”, Scorsese’s latest will be a “challenging but very rewarding way” to start 2017.
