Film review: Silence — ‘Passionate ferocity’

Who can do mysticism on the screen — and do we want them to? Movies about religion offend some of the people all of the time. Believers don’t like films by Buñuel, Fellini or Jodorowsky, which clout the clergy and mock the pious. Unbelievers don’t like tales that assume God to be in all our hearts. And no one — or only prolixity junkies — likes the licence-to-be-long-winded that is taken by missionary cinema on either side, whether in biblical epics or art house marathons.

Silence, Martin Scorsese’s tale of persecuted Christians in 17th-century Japan, is punishingly long. Adapted from Shūsaku Endō’s acclaimed 1966 novel, the 161-minute story starts and ends with passionate ferocity. The torture and death of innocents may make a harrowing watch — disregarding the unvoiced issue of whether volunteer martyrs for a missionary creed are “innocent” — but these scenes prove less punitive as cinema than what comes between.

We get a plotless, if not wordless, trudge into the interior of a land and two human souls. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver play the Portuguese priests seeking their apostatised mentor and compatriot (Liam Neeson), vanished presumed gone-native. Both actors look “in the zone”: thin, intense, staring of eye; tremulous with inner zeal. But they are handicapped by the pidgin English they’re asked to speak. Presumably substituted by the screenwriters (Scorsese and Jay Cocks) for the Portuguese the priests would actually have spoken, it is understood and responded to in kind by every passing Japanese. (“You know our language!” Which one would that be, we head-scratch?) The historical nonsensicality has us begging for some real-lingo Iberian dialogue, even at the cost of subtitles.

It’s a long midsection, language apart. All holy anguish, inner monologue, forlorn hide and seek (with pursuers) and the brief histrionic lightning flashes of Issei Ogata’s performance as “The Inquisitor”. This veteran Japanese actor (Emperor Hirohito in Sokurov’s The Sun) gives his lines scorch, brightness and a sardonic hiss. Keep a weather eye on the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

The landscapes are full of picturesque fog; I wish I thought it was Scorsese’s comment on the fog of faith. But never raised is Christianity’s own dubious role in the east, as a patrimony of western imperialism. In the film’s last act, drama bursts through again, powerful and moving. So does life-or-death dialectic, with a searingly argued debate about faith and apostasy between Garfield and Neeson (superb), the latter chastened by years of wrestled guilt and intellectual purgation. These scenes, though, if not too little, are nearly too late. If we get a DVD director’s cut of Silence, it should surely be just that. A ruthless pruning, or severe reshaping, of the cinematic overgrowth between Act One and Act Five.