Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (Paramount, 12.23) is a long, sluggish, big-canvas spiritual epic that has obviously been sculpted with precision and passion. Set in 17th Century Japan and beautifully shot by Rodrigo Prieto, it’s clearly the work of a top-tier filmmaker who’s unloading in a very rooted way, and with great delicacy. But it’s a vast, sprawling thing, and some of it, to be honest, is boring and slow, and some of the violence is difficult to watch.
And yet it does pay off at the end, and I didn’t expect it to, given my feelings about religion and Catholics in particular, and so I was surprised by this. I wasn’t head over heels with what I’d seen and I was deciding around the midway point that it probably should be shorter, but the film (which runs 159 minutes) does sneak up and turn the key during the last 20 or 25 minutes.
But those first 130 minutes…whoa daddy. Quite the eyeful, eloquent writing, handsome design but glum and arduous and snail-paced like a sonuvabitch. But it’s still a fine film for what it is. You just have to say to yourself “this is not a film about my enjoyment…it’s a journey, a meditation, a lesson. Just man up and sit through it.”
Based upon the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endō, Silence is about the 17th Century persecution of Catholics in Japan, and particularly the Jesuits who introduced Catholicism to that country and did what they could to scatter the seeds.
Start to finish Silence is about matters of the spirit, but the visual depictions are about almost nothing other than unpleasant acts and conditions. Cruelty, torture, deprivation, starvation. I’m talking about crucified victims being drowned and burned to death, starved and beheaded and hung upside down with blood seeping out of an arterial neck wound. But the victims take it and eventually die (all but one, I should say) because they believe in the salvation of Jesus Christ.
