Death by Adaptation: Silence
Paramount PicturesDirector Martin Scorsese is no stranger to adaptations, having made over a dozen of them over the course of his prolific career. While he has often been mislabelled as "that guy who only makes mob films," there is a through-line that he has carried over since his feature film Who’s That Knocking at My Door: faith. Raised as a Catholic, Scorsese has often questioned his religious beliefs through many characters, tackling sin and the overbearing weight of guilt in more or less overt ways in all his films.
Similarly to one of his all-time favourite directors – the great Ingmar Bergman – he too crafted an unofficial "faith trilogy" of sorts, albeit over the span of many decades. The first entry was 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, wherein Scorsese chronicled the final days in the life of Jesus Christ, humanising the Son of God in a touching and poetic way that was too human for ardent Christians. The second film was Kundun from 1997, focusing on the journey of enlightenment of the Dalai Lama. Lastly, he made Silence in 2016, based on the 1966 novel by Shūsaku Endō. Endō’s writing is quite unique since he was a Japanese Roman Catholic, a perspective that is very much unlike that of most of his contemporaries. His style of writing is heavily metaphorical, utilising characters and situations to comment on both the socio-political climate of Japan at the time, as well as on the forgotten history of Christian persecutions during the 17th century.
It is fitting, maybe even banal, that Scorsese's trilogy on Christianity would end with a film whose title closely mirrors Bergman's own third faith film The Silence, from 1963. The two films make for interesting companion pieces, for both the Swedish drama and Endō's novel are about the deafening silence of God in time of need. However, what sets both the novel and Scorsese's film apart from other similarly pessimistic tales is that the titular silence is good, for lack of a better word.
Endō crafts the tale of two Jesuit priests in epistolary form, with Father Rodrigues (played by Andrew Garfield) keeping track of his perilous journey into Japan. It makes for an engaging and believable reading experience that serves in grounding the events and giving the main character a chance to reflect on how this experience is reshaping both his belief in the Almighty and his believers. Outside of the opening and closing pieces of voice-over narration and occasional musings from Rodrigues, Scorsese rightfully removes this element to make for a wholly audio-visual realistic experience. The adventure that Father Rodrigues and Father Garupe (Adam Driver) witness sees them coming face to face with the simple faith of the Japanese islanders, the vicious persecutions of the Inquisitor, and the contradictory figure of Kichijirō. The latter brings a smidgen of humour to the picture, for he constantly denounces his faith in Jesus as a way to save himself from certain death. His behaviour raises doubts into the mind of the Jesuits: is he a lesser Christian for acting in such a cowardly way or is survival more important than dying a martyr? This and other moral dilemmas riddle the pages of the novel and the script, putting as much doubt into the characters as in the readers and audiences themselves. Both are challenging pieces of historical fiction that are much easier to appreciate and enjoy because of how they act as mirrors, forcing everyone to consider how they would have acted in a scenario such as this one. Would they embrace death like the poor Japanese, trample over the cross like Kichijirō, or commit apostasy like Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), the main reason behind the expedition of the two Portuguese priests?
For someone known for his needle drops and enthusiastic use of music – especially given the high-octane string music heavily featured in the trailers – Scorsese made the bold choice to feature no non-diegetic music. That automatically makes everything that happens in the nearly three-hour runtime feel much slower, also thanks to Rodrigo Prieto's calm, calculated, static camerawork. This world feels alive and tactile precisely because of how methodically paced and gorgeously shot it is, with impressive attention to detail put into the sets and costumes (courtesy of Dante Ferretti, a Scorsese regular since The Age of Innocence).This deliberately ponderous atmosphere also adds a strong feeling of pain, suffering and oppression into the sporadic tortures that the Japanese commit against the Christian minority; while never graphic or bloody – paying respects to the real victims of these massacres – seeing four individuals hanging on a cross, incessantly hit by waves, is an unforgettable visual.
These acts of violence are fundamental not only in commemorating a disturbing piece of religious persecution that has oft been forgotten, but also in developing Father Rodrigues’ character and giving both viewers and readers a glimpse into his psyche. Andrew Garfield does a tremendous job in the role, managing to add all the nuance present in the character’s thoughts without sacrificing more emotional moments of breaking down. Father Rodrigues represents everything that is right and wrong about missionaries of that time, and even some gung-ho Christians that go to African villages to "spread the word of Jesus": there is an earnest intent in giving joy and faith to these persecuted villagers, but also a narcissistic and smug way of pretending to act like Christ. It helps that he is a refreshingly self-aware character, recognising how the Christian Japanese seem to be more obsessed with the tangible objects of faith rather than faith itself, as well as his ordeal closely mirroring that of many martyrs or the Christians who hid in catacombs underneath Rome to hold mass in peace.
All these musings on faith and acting like Jesus are wonderfully juxtaposed with the interactions with Inoue Masashige in the second half of the film and novel: both Endō and Scorsese inject much-needed humour and cleverness to avoid a devilish and overly negative portrayal of these Japanese. The narrative comes together beautifully well when Masashige makes Father Rodrigues realise that all this death and suffering could have been avoided had Christian missionaries refused to force their own beliefs around many countries. Despite being a story that shows the importance of faith, never letting go of it, and finding beauty and joy even when faced with the worst of humanity, finding God when all seems lost, Silence is also a reminder that too many men of faith acted superior to others, essentially colonising certain countries, indoctrinating part of the population in a way that was ultimately pointless: either the population reverted back to their original faith, or they simply changed the name of whatever deity they believed in into that of God.
Endō's novel has essentially been adapted beat for beat, scene by scene, and sometimes even word for word by Scorsese and Jay Cocks' script. If a reader did not know any better, they would easily mistake the book as a novelisation of the film, which is a very strong compliment for all three writers.
What ultimately makes both versions worth discovering is how they manage to reaffirm and strengthen the faith of Christian readers and viewers, while atheists and agnostics get a glimpse of what religious enlightenment actually looks like, and how genuine faith can be truly lifesaving in time of need. Silence is an incredibly powerful religious story that is likely to stand the test of time, showing a mature sense of what it means to be Christian without falling into the bigoted pitfalls that many other films and books end up in.