Silence (2016)
2016
R
161 Minutes
Two Jesuit priests, Sebastião Rodrigues and Francis Garrpe, travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact.
User Review
-
WHAT I LIKED: Should you denounce your faith when your life is at stake? And does the apparent silence of God mean he's not there? These are the questions posed to the characters in Martin Scorsese's 'Silence,' as we follow a Catholic Missionary Rodriguez (Andrew Garfield) witnessing the persecution of hiding Christians as he travels across Japan to find his missing mentor Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who has reportedly abandoned God.
To a stone-cold atheist like me, it seems crazy that you could ever choose your faith over your life, but the fact that Scorsese does such an incredibly horrifying job of bringing the persecution to life means you really feel the conflict of faith that Rodriguez has when witnessing that. He does his best to cling onto his teachings, but he's challenged by the looming question of whether Ferreira apostatises, and the fact that the Japanese start killing people unless he does so himself. You long to find out what he's going to do as he flip flops from giving in to their demands in order to save people's lives, to challenging them and staying true to his beliefs even when it results in suffering.
In the end, we learn that Ferreira did apostatise after a similar conflict, and Rodriguez is ultimately forced to do the same. But neither man finds peace with this, and in the end, Rodriguez is buried years later with a cross, proving that he never truly left his faith behind at all even if he'd long ceased any forbidden missionary work.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The fact that the pair's denouncement of Christianity was effectively a manipulation by the evil of the Japanese does arguably mean that their crisis of faith is never really resolved.
More than that though, the reason this film is hard to stay engaged with is not only its bleak brutality, but also the fact it repeats itself so much with test after test for Rodriguez.
VERDICT: On a gruelling journey through repetitive persecution, a missionary questions his religion, is forced to denounce it, and yet never leaves it. That makes 'Silence,' an interesting but often inert exploration of faith.0 member like this review.
