Silence (MA). Director: Martin Scorsese. Starring: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson, Yosuke Kubozuka. 161 minutes
If you haven't seen the Jesuit Brendan Busse's interview with actor Andrew Garfield for America magazine, it is worth the read. In preparation for his role in Martin Scorsese's Silence, in which he plays a Jesuit priest, Garfield underwent the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, one of the foundational experiences of Jesuit spirituality.
He reflects frankly and movingly on coming to the Exercises from 'the marketplace of riches, honour and pride' that is Hollywood, wanting to confront a persistent sense of his own 'not-enough-ness'. What he experienced instead was 'falling in love with this person ... Jesus Christ'.
This is not your typical Hollywood story, but then Silence is not your typical Hollywood film. The rigours of religious faith — especially where they butt up against the limitations of ordinary humanity — have been a core theme of Scorsese's oeuvre. But rarely has this conflict been portrayed with such passion, beauty and rawness as in Silence.
Based upon a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo, it is the story of two 17th century Portuguese Jesuits (Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan to locate their former mentor, Fr Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who is said to have renounced his faith, and to spread Catholicism.
There, the priests find the local Christian populations have been driven underground, under threat of torture and execution if they are discovered and refuse to apostasise. The lesson they come to learn against this fraught backdrop is that the living out of religious faith and the strengths and limitations of ordinary humanity cannot be considered in isolation from each other.
Garfield's Fr Rodrigues learns this as he witnesses numerous innocent people tortured and murdered in the name of the faith he has come to promote; through his conversations with various inquisitors who argue, not unpersuasively, that Catholicism is incompatible with Japanese culture; and in the face of a Japanese fisherman (Yosuke Kubozuka) who repeatedly apostasises while so many of his fellows refuse, and just as often returns to plead for forgiveness.
Finally he witnesses it in Fr Ferreira, whose apostasy is far beyond what he feared, and the deeper significance of which he, in his earnestness, is slow to comprehend.
As a production Silence is hard to fault, a resolutely old-school religious epic, with Rodrigo Prieto's expansive cinematography being of particular note. But at its heart is a deeply layered