Silence - Movie Review

Thoughts on the Movie

 “Silence”

            Silence, directed by Martin Scorsese is based on a book by Japanese Christian Shusako Endo. Scorsese, a practicing Roman Catholic, read the book long ago and has been thinking and working on bringing an adaptation of the book to the screen for twenty years. It may be the work that he personally views as his most important. As a director he is one of the more profound directors of recent decades having directed such movies as Taxi, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

            Many of my readers are Evangelicals, and for many Evangelicals, watching Scorsese films seems questionable. This is probably due to how his films can be brutal, and also how he tends to use movies to ask questions rather than give answers. An Evangelical sermon somehow does not seem complete if the audience is left contemplating a question. We Evangelicals concentrate on showing how Jesus is the answer and the reason for the season. Questions often rattle us in our search for a secure faith. The story shown in “Silence” is a story of a brutal time of Japanese persecution of Catholic Christians in and around the city of Nagasaki. It is a story in which many unannounced questions are raised in the mind of the film goer while watching the movie. There is little if any sermonizing – the questions rise naturally from the scenes and plot. They linger. To me, that is the genius of the film, In real life spiritual issues rise from events and they linger within us.

            I would recommend this film to mature and thinking movie goers who don’t mind coming out of a theater a little bit provoked, and perhaps left unsettled by a sense that sometimes our ideals are going to be tested in ways we didn’t expect. This is how this film develops. It begins with two priests getting off a ship along the shore line. Historically, the area around Nagasaki doesn’t have great harbors, so the movie captures this with the priests coming ashore making their way walking towards the beach in the shallows some distance from where they come ashore. There are rumors of persecution of the Christians. There are rumors that a missing priest has apostatized. The priests hope to prove the rumors wrong, for the priest is someone they admired, whom helped them to choose to devote their lives to being missionaries.

            Once ashore they are happily rewarded with the enthusiastic greetings they receive from the Catholic Christians seeing a priest having come ashore. Soon they meet with other Christians and enjoy pleasant fellowship with simple believers, mostly people of limited means but who eagerly desire to partake of the faith.

            The initial phase of the film is agreeable to our Christian ideals. The missionary priest or minister lands ashore, meets believers, strengthens them with the Word and sacraments, and begins to proclaim the message freely to all who will hear. But then the opposition comes and changes the picture. The reality of persecution meeting the weakness of human fresh begins to become real. There are people who feel the anguish of conscience for failing to stand firm when the trial of persecution began. Such a person feels himself outside of the community of the Christians who treat him with suspicion and outside of the Japanese culture resisting the spread of Christianity on their isles.

            Many questions confronted me as I watched the film. They would rise unspoken in the moment of a scene. I would wonder what I would do if I were caught in the reality of this scene caught in a passing frame of film. Is persecution ever only about our faith? Did the Japanese reject the spread of Christianity on their shores because they rejected the message of Jesus or of the Jesuit priests who brought the message? Or did the persecution arise because beyond the shoreline, but connected to the missionaries were the European ships that brought not only priests and a Christian message, but connections to the rising European powers who were staking out claims on ports and territories throughout the world? The Japanese rulers knew that Portugal had taken control of the Chinese city of Macau, and that the Spanish had taken control of the Luzon region of the Philippines. The English and Dutch were latecomers in the establishment of colonies but wherever European ships came to port, European claims of supremacy and the right to rule would soon follow. These questions are not set forth as much in dialogue as understood as the movie goer is drawn into the scenes of the film flickering in and out of our sight.

            There are scenes where we are called on to ask what constitutes actual faith. There were problems translating the Scriptures into the Japanese language expressed by representative characters. Did the Japanese believers suffering to death in the persecution actually understand the message of the faith? Or did they remain naturalists worshipping the power of nature through the symbol of Jesus like the sun rising from the night of darkness? Priests are urged to believe the people are dying not for their understanding of a Christian faith not meant for the Japanese soil, but for their willingness to die for their loyalty to these human priests. How do we know when one has begun to believe in Christ? Are these peasants dying for the faith or out of simple human loyalty to the priests they have come to respect and admire? In the world where God has become flesh, can one’s embracing of the Christian priest or messenger show a connection to the incarnate Christ before one understands the basic creeds of the Christian faith? I recall a story I once read of Adoniram Judson. He had landed in what was then Burma. Passing through the crowd Judson spoke kindly to a woman as he moved around her in the crowd. She was moved by the way he carried himself and the kindness in his voice. Her instant thought was that “his god must be the god.” At what point are we joined to Christ? Is it when we intellectually understand the creeds of the faith, or can it begin at an earlier time in a much less conscious manner? Can the Christ of our creeds and doctrines be separated from the Christ who fills the Church, and might a peasant who sees divinity in a representative of a church already have be connection to the Christ of the Church communicated through its members united to Christ? Conversely, could some seemingly strong connections to Christ be simply the expressions of simple and ordinary human affections having little or no actual spiritual communion taking place? Such questions plague the devoted educated priest as much as the struggling believer with a lack of solid instruction to battle our human tendencies to superstition.

            There are questions of what attracted the foreign people to the European messengers of the faith. One apostatized priest tells how though he lost his faith he still had a mission to the Japanese, since they were eager to hear about matters of science that he understood which had not yet been discovered in the Japanese world. Life is complex. In our Western world we invariably compartmentalize the complexities into separate spheres. When we come with our Christian message to another island, or approach the island of another individual, we imagine bringing our Christian message in its own separate sphere to the people to whom we bring it. But they see our Christian message in the package of our humanity and cultural influences. They see us and our message in a single unified manner. The Japanese rulers who saw a European missionary, saw a European ship not far from the shoreline hoisting a flag of a nation actively building an empire of colonies around the globe. They saw valuable trade and new understandings of science that might with wisdom be pried from the traders without the loss of their national independence.

            There was another question I was confronted with in this film worth pondering.At one point it is said in reference to a character in the film, “This man is strong, he wall fall easily.” Strength of faith, strength of purpose - what is it? When does the seeming strength of our inner purpose actually more a frailty ready to be exposed than a resource to help us through the coming trial? We fortify ourselves hoping to become strong only to discover that our fortifications were the one weakness that became the reason for our downfall.

            I suppose there is a movie-goer who will see “Silence” and grumble on the way out about a movie presenting a wishy-washy perspective regarding the Christian faith. But I think for others it will highlight questions needing to be contemplated, which have always silently plagued us, that somehow we could easily ignore. But the scenes of this movie and of life itself have a way of bringing such questions vividly before our eyes when we are least expecting such questions to have any relevance to life.

            I wish I knew how to recommend this movie to the specific people who would find this movie as enriching to understanding life as I have found it. I can't do that. I can't even predict the people I know who will like or dislike the movie because you never know which people will thrive facing questions or shrink at the questions. Sadly this movie did not remain in theaters long. After two weeks in my Tulsa area, the closest theater showing the film is slightly over 100 miles away. Most of you will probably have to wait until it comes on Netflix or is sold as a DVD. If there remains a theater near you showing it, I recommend it. I don’t understand why the marketing for this movie seems to have been done so poorly. It seems like instead of a movie one of film's great directors worked on for decades, it was simply treated as a film no one would want to see. I think we underestimate how many people are interested in a realistic film about faith and doubt that ponders the great questions that plague us even if regarding those doubts we simply speak in "Silence".