There’s a baptism scene in Silence that speaks volumes. Set in 17th-century Japan, during a period of persecution of Christians by the ruling shogunate, the film centres on a Catholic Portuguese missionary (Andrew Garfield) who has been smuggled into the country, where he has been taken in by peasant converts.
As the Jesuit priest Rodrigues christens an impoverished Christian couple’s baby, the mother turns to the padre, inquiring whether her baby is now in “paradise”.
No, no, he corrects her, with a smile less patronising than patiently tolerant of her theological naivete (evidence of the cultural divide that runs, like a deep chasm, throughout this long, philosophically thorny and sometimes violent film).
As Martin Scorsese’s ambitious yet frustrating adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 book makes clear, potential torture and death await those Christians who refuse to publicly renounce their faith by stepping on an image of Jesus.
Slow drowning on a crucifix planted in a rising tide, being burned alive on a pyre, decapitation – these are among the fates imposed on Christians by Inoue, the samurai-turned-inquisitor who runs the ruthless, often gruesome campaign of religious oppression.
Silence does not show us this savagery gratuitously, using it rather to further the argument that is the film’s true subject. The struggle between apostasy and martyrdom – not when one’s own death is at stake, but when one’s actions determine the fates of other – is the sharp spearhead of Silence, whose title refers to the uncommunicativeness of God in the face of prayer and human suffering.
God eventually speaks to Rodrigues, although it’s open to speculation whether the voice is coming from the deity or inside his own head.
That comes late in the film, after the padre and several of his flock have been taken prisoner by Inoue. (A second missionary, played by Adam Driver, has already been violently dispatched.)
At the point that God speaks to Rodrigues, the Jesuit is being confronted with a conundrum, one that has nothing to do with Rodrigues’ decision whether to lay down his life, but with his reluctance to apostatise, even in the face of others’ deaths.
Rodrigues’ former Jesuit mentor Father Ferreira, a missionary who apostatised years earlier and now lives as a secular Japanese scholar, makes an 11th-hour appearance ( Liam Neeson) to talk his young protege into recanting. But it’s the lives that hang in the balance that lend the talky film drama.
Which of these things, the film asks, is more Christian, in the original sense of “Christ-like”: To steadfastly maintain one’s faith, even if it means others will die? Or to renounce Jesus publicly, while holding true to him in your heart?
It takes Scorsese long enough to drive the point home – putting the audience through its own kind of torture – but the moral is tough and nuanced. – The Washington Post