Silence
Martin Scorsese is one of those directors who wears his influences wherever he goes. His movies feel simultaneously indebted to the past and fresh because he also brings his own vision to everything he touches. The same is true for Silence, a film he's been trying to make for 20+ years. Though it is reductive in the extreme, I couldn't help but see this in part ass Scorsese's most obvious tip of the hat to filmmakers like Malick, Coppola, Kurosawa, and Bergman. Though his camera doesn't rove like Malick's, Scorsese shares here a vision of man intimately connected to nature, and a flair for combining the two sumptuously (not to mention the oft-whispered voice-over that runs throughout the film). He also matches Coppola's tight control of tone and narrative over the course of a long descent into madness in a deeply foreign land. Kurosawa's influence might be the most obvious, as his home country provides the setting and I haven't seen such a fully formed and beautiful representation of Japan since Ran. But it is Bergman who proves to the be the most telling predecessor, because Silence sometimes plays out like a slower, less funny version of The Seventh Seal. Both films are preoccupied with figuring out their protagonists' place in a rapidly changing and often hazardous world. This combination of influences from all-time great directors should entice any cinephile to the theater, though their trip might not prove as fruitful as it was for me.
More than almost any other movie I can think of, Silence demands a viewer who is willing to go on a long journey and bring their own interest in the topic or art of cinema with them or risk being left to wonder why they just spent nearly three hours watching a guy worry about God in Japan. It's not a crowd-pleaser nor is it even daring in the way that gets some movie-buffs going. This is in some ways a very standard movie, but one which will turn off people looking for any old movie to watch. There is a lot of talking and also a lot of, um, silence. There aren't many particularly exhilarating sequences or shots, but the film is also gorgeous. Scenes don't often linger, but the film lasts much longer than most people will have patience for. Character motivations are clear and often stated outright, but the film is also intensely concerned with minute changes in dispositions and relationships. It's an epic and a character study, small and large in scale at the same time.
The story is simple. Two Jesuits go in search of another, rumored to be dead at the hands of Japanese Buddhists because he was converting the locals to Catholicism. The two young priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) must keep hidden or else face the same supposed fate as their mentor (Liam Neeson). In the process of trying to find him, they help some of the converted on their faith journeys and perform various sacraments. Thing go bad. I don't want to get too much into the rest of the film except to say that the struggles Garfield's Rodrigues faces cause him to question his own faith and often ask God directly why he and his fellow Christians must suffer so terribly. It's not a new question or even a new way of thinking about it. But it is dramatically interesting, existentially important, and really really really well done. You feel Garfield's torment, you experience some part of the dread and terror that the tortured Christians are subjected to. And the silence oppresses everything.
Indeed, the movie lives up to its title. I don't remember a single bit of score to accompany the images in the way we've all come to expect. Garfield and company experience the kind of trials that would and do leave one crying out for some guidance, but none comes. Only the cicadas--those ever-present insects I first got to know through the outstanding anime Neon Genesis Evangelion--respond, but their drone only adds to the sense, stated by a villainous character in the film, that Japan really is a swamp where nothing grows. Ah, but don't we see evidence of growth everywhere? Isn't every shot shrouded in green? This is where the underlying conflict arises. Yes, this is a movie about a man's faith, but it's also a movie about imperialism. It is difficult for me to see these two European emissaries from the Catholic Church as wholly positive forces in the world. Though the movie is attached to Garfield as the protagonist who therefore gains the audience's automatic sympathy, I think Scorsese leaves at least some room for an alternate perspective, and he does so with his camera. The camera itself is often quite low to the ground and angled up at Garfield's face (among others), especially when he questions God's plans or even existence. These low angles simultaneously achieve two purposes: firstly, they emphasize the lack of communication from the divine presence; and secondly, they further connect the humans to their worldly existence. That second effect ties into the Buddhist ideas of pain and suffering as inescapable parts of existence well as connects them to the natural world. It is a remarkable but simple technique, and it works to both enhance and undermine the top-layer narrative at the same time.
I wouldn't call Silence a nuanced movie, but the effect it had on me was a subtle one. I was engrossed throughout, though also acutely aware of all the noise from my fellow theatergoers. When the movie is predicated on such a quiet mood any noise is liable to take you out of it, and my theater was not lacking loud popcorn chewers or seat-repositioners. However, oddly, that outside noise only served to heighten my awareness of the film's own silence. Never before has a less-than-perfect theater situation actually worked for the film, but lo, Martin Scorsese has accomplished the feat of making such a movie. It's quite an accomplishment. I'm still looking at the world a little differently days later, and that's the surest sign of a great film. It's a shame this looks to be going unnoticed. I understand why, I happen to have the weird confluence of factors which would lead somebody to go crazy for a movie like this one. I also think that this movie will be one of those that future Scorsese fans will discover after watching Goodfellas and Taxi Driver and The Departed 10 times each. Then they'll tell everybody that yeah, those movies are good and all, but to get the true Scorsese experience you have to see Silence, too.
A+