Silence is quite unlike any film that Martin Scorsese has ever made. It depicts the tribulations of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in early 17th-century Japan, where the feudal Tokugawa shogunate has outlawed Christianity. The film’s recreation of the Edo period is scrupulously designed and stunningly photographed, but Silence is not a historical epic in the usual sense. Like the director’s evocative The Last Temptation of Christ, this is a story of spiritual agony, of a man who struggles to understand God’s will. Unlike Jesus of Nazareth, however, the priest Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) cannot hear his Father’s voice. He might not be alone, but he is lost.
Rodrigues and his companion, Father Garupe (Adam Driver), arrive in Japan seeking their mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who's rumored to have apostatized after falling into the clutches of the metsuke, an intelligence official whom the Jesuits call The Inquisitor. The priests discover a clandestine Christian populace that lives in perpetual terror. The local daimyos are relentless in ferreting out the last vestiges of Christianity, and soon the Jesuits are obliged to split up. Rodrigues is shortly captured by the Inquisitor, however, commencing a harrowing imprisonment defined by physical and psychological torture. His captors’ demands are trifling: Simply renounce God by stepping on an image of Christ.
Purely as cinema, Silence is Scorsese’s most polished film in more than two decades, and perhaps it's the first in his long career that feels born of ferocious compulsion. To the irreligious (and the pragmatic), the fundamental choice that Rodrigues faces—apostatize or die—might seem like no choice at all, but the triumph of Silence is how acute the priest’s anguish feels. This is an intense film: forlorn and ghastly, yet thoughtful. Even the faithless will find it a powerful rumination on integrity, morality, and freedom of conscience.
Silence opens Friday, January 13 in wide release.
