Silence

I admit that I felt wary of watching Silence, a Scorcese epic piece about Christianity. This journey did not sound at all appealing to me. But from the first frame he had my attention. A spooky, smoky foreign world of conflict and brutality unfolded right before me, with beauty and dread in equal measure. After watching Fences directed by Denzel Washington and Mel Gibson's current effort, Martin Scorcese reminded me what real film making looks like. Or used to, anyway.

I had a little trouble accepting Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield as Portuguese Jesuit priests. They just read as slightly douchey millennials for the first 30 minutes or so. But that's ok. I had nearly three hours to adjust to them and did finally accept them.

The film deals with how Japan's rulers set about to ruthlessly eradicate Christianity from their country. They hunted and tortured Christians, yes. But in this story a great deal of time and resources were spent on psychologically breaking the priests and forcing them to apostatize, or publicly renounce their faith.

Faith is such a loaded subject. It's hard to imagine a story about religion not tilting into propaganda for some sort of conservative or liberal agenda. Silence asked a lot of tough questions without leading you toward any predetermined answers, which I appreciated. Can you have an inner faith without an outer expression of it? Do any two people experience their beliefs in the same way? Is there only one interpretation of Christ-like behavior? Who gets to decide? Are the rules of a doctrine more important than the people who subscribe to it?

I appreciated the absolute mastery of skill. Beautiful imagery throughout; beauty in service of story is so magical! Editor Thelma Schoonmaker sets a patient, prayerful pace that somehow doesn't drag and kill your desire to keep following along. Gods, I love her!

I was thoroughly surprised by my own enjoyment of this film. I'm disappointed Silence didn't attract a little more Oscar love.