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 centers 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, as they call him, inquiring whether her baby is now in “paradise.”
No, no, he corrects her, with a smile less patronizing 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 brutally violent film). Paradise is the reward that God is preparing for the faithful in the afterlife.
For many of that young mother’s fellow underground Christians that afterlife will come sooner than expected. As Martin Scorsese’s ambitious yet frustrating adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 book makes clear, potential torture and death await those who refuse to renounce their faith by stepping on an image of Jesus.
Drowning on a crucifix in a rising tide, burning alive on a pyre, summary decapitation, and bleeding to death while hanging, upside down, over a pit — these are among the fates imposed on Christians by Inoue, the samurai-turned-inquisitor who runs the ruthless, gruesome campaign of religious oppression.
Silence, to its credit, 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 others — is the sharp spearhead of Silence, whose title refers to the uncommunicativeness of God in the face of prayer and human suffering. Oddly, God eventually speaks to Rodrigues, quite literally, although it’s open to speculation whether that voice is coming from the deity or from inside Rodrigues’ own head.
That moment comes late in the film, after the padre and several of his flock have been taken prisoner by Inoue, whose portrayal of coldbloodedness, by Issei Ogata, borders on caricature. (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 lends the film an urgency that it previously struggled to generate. (Scorsese wouldn’t have weakened his film by trimming a half-hour.)
Which of these things, the film asks — in a screenplay co-written by Scorsese and Jay Cocks — is more Christian, in the original sense of “Christ-like“: To steadfastly maintain one’s faith, even if it means that others will die because of your actions? Or to renounce Jesus publicly, while holding true to him in your heart? As Rodrigues’ former Jesuit mentor Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson) says, “There are some things more important than the judgment of the Church.”
That’s an argument with which Scorsese seems to agree. It sure takes him long enough to drive that point home — putting the film’s audience through its own kind of torture — but the moral of his story is ultimately both tough and nuanced.