Silence, they say, speaks volumes. And with a running time of 161 minutes, Martin Scorsese’s labour of love, which has supposedly been quarter of a century in the making certainly succeeds on that front. According to another proverb, based on a German line of dialogue from Thomas Carlyle’s novel Sartor (“Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden” meaning “speech is silver, silence is…” you’ve guessed it), it is also supposed to resemble the colour of Usain Bolt’s impressive medal collection.

But though the absence of a musical score is refreshing in that it makes you focus on the words and releases you from the manipulative trap of being told when and how to feel by the swelling of strings or crashing of drums, and though the central question of “how does someone retain their faith in an Almighty who is silent in the face of torture and suffering?” is more relevant now than ever, Scorsese’s adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s fictional novel of the same name, which won Japan’s prestigious Tanizaki literature prize in 1966, merits a place on the podium but is silver at best.

Spider Man and the son of Hans Solo aka Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver play a couple of devout Portuguese Jesuit missionaries (Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe) who disobey orders from their superior Father Alessandro Valignano (Ciarán Hinds) to spread the word in Japan in order to support fellow Christians who are forced into hiding for fear of persecution by the Grand Inquisitor Inoue Masashige (Issey Ogata) and to investigate reports that their spiritual teacher Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson) has renounced his faith and committed apostasy.

Courtesy of a drunken guide and perpetual sinner Kichijiro (Yōsuke Kubozuka), the young missionaries witness at close hand the barbarism of the ruling authorities on “those who embrace the outlawed faith and those who hide them” through a series of mass beheadings and drownings, brutal beatings and burnings, culminating in the horror show that is anazuri – the act of being hung upside down over a pit and slowly blead to death. After long years of secrecy during which the ever-decreasing Christian population has been driven underground to hide and practice their faith, it is little wonder that their expressionless faces are described as “masks” which “cannot reveal sorrow or joy”.

“Why do they have to suffer so much?” asks Rodrigues. “Why did God pick them to bear such a burden?” Will their trials and tribulations on earth be rewarded with eternal salvation in paradise (which one Japanese woman innocently describes as a place where “No one hungry, never sick. No taxes, no hard work.”)? Or as Rodrigues begins to suspect as he turns to God for an answer but is met with a wall of silence, will it all “end in nothingness”? That, in a nutshell, is what the two hours’ and forty-one minutes traffic of our soundstage is about.

The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto who won an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain and previously worked with Scorsese on The Wolf of Wall Street is impeccable, from the opening shots of steaming geysers and swirling fog clouds to the final scenes of death and salvation in a Buddhist temple. And, as I said before, the lack of a musical score is a joy. Though the orchestration of “natural” sounds such as lapping waves and birdsong is as meticulously crafted as a John Williams theme tune. Credit too to Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver for their understated performances which shift the focus away from their star billings onto the dilemmas faced by their characters. And the dialogue by Scorsese and his frequent collaborator Jay Cox, a lot of which is presumably borrowed from the original novel, verges on the poetic: “A tree which flourishes in one kind of earth may decay and die in another. It is the same with the tree of Christianity. The leaves decay here. The buds die.”

But… not much happens in the way of action or drama to raise the stakes or quicken the pulse. And the pace is hypnotically slow. Which is fine for a couple of hours. But for a couple of hours plus VAT? Sure, there are graphic scenes of torture and on a number of occasions the missionaries find themselves between a rock and a hard place as they are forced to choose between renouncing their faith in order to save the lives of others or staying true to their beliefs and thus sending innocent people to their deaths, but the repetitive manner in which Scorsese chooses to focus on their anguish robs the audience of any deep emotional engagement for the characters, in particular Andrew Garfield’s Rodrigues, does all the crying for us! In close-up after close-up after close-up!

That said, the unexpected comical performances by the troupe of impressive and ever-watchful Japanese actors (notably Yōsuke Kubozuka as the drunken guide Kichijiro and Issey Ogata as the Grand Inquisitor) are a delight. And the continual thread of reflective voice-overs starting with Ferreira’s last letter before he goes AWOL to a series of communications between Rodrigues and his superior in which he wrestles with his doubts and ending with an extract from the journal of a Dutch trader Dieter Albrecht (Béla Baptiste) who came into contact with the missionaries, add structure and focus. But is this Scorsese’s masterpiece? I plead the fifth.

Video courtesy of: Paramount Pictures

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Peter Callaghan
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