Greg DalyGreg Daly experiences Martin Scorcese’s Silence
“If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in his 1908 creed Orthodoxy, continuing: “He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.”
Barring one chilling sequence, cats don’t feature heavily in Martin Scorcese’s Silence, but the most cruel of torments certainly do in this film that asks where God is when his children suffer.
Scorcese doesn’t linger on the brutality of the persecutions inflicted on the Christians of 17th-Century Japan, but neither does he evade it, showing Christians being showered with boiling water, piled in bundles to be burned alive, crucified to be battered by waves, and decapitated.
If it’s horrifying to watch these torments being acted out, it must be far worse to have witnessed them in reality, and the film turns on the reactions of two Christian missionaries, the Jesuit priests Fr Cristóvão Ferreira and his onetime student Fr Sebastião Rodrigues, when forced to witness ordinary Christians being tortured by anazuri, entailing their being hung upside down for days at a time, a small slit by their ear prolonging their lives and agony by preventing their blood from pooling in their heads.
Converts
The film is set roughly 100 years after St Francis Xavier and other Jesuits introduced Christianity to Japan in the 1540s. Initially successful, the number of converts rose to – by some counts – over 250,000 by the turn of the 17th Century at which point Nagasaki was known as ‘Japan’s Rome’.
The reunification of Japan after the 16th-Century civil wars changed things, especially with the rise to prominence of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Worried that the Spaniards and Portuguese had imperial ambitions towards Japan, Tokugawa had Catholicism banned in 1614, decades later demanding the expulsion of all missionaries and the execution of all converts.
It was against this background that the historical Fr Ferreira apostatised in 1633, denying the faith, taking a Japanese wife and name, assisting in the trials of other missionaries and even before his death in 1650 supposedly writing a book called The Deception Unmasked that presented Christianity as a fiction. Silence tells the story of two fictional protegees of Fr Ferreira, Andrew Garfield’s Fr Rodrigues and Adam Driver’s Fr Garrpe, who refuse to believe the rumours they hear about their mentor and set out to Japan to find him.
The film is based on a widely acclaimed 1966 novel of the same name by the Japanese Catholic author Shūsaku Endō, which director Martin Scorcese first read when in Japan in 1989 in the immediate aftermath of playing Vincent Van Gogh in Dreams, one of the last films by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It is perhaps apt, then, that one of the oddest performances in the film seems to owe a lot to that of Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Seven Samurai.
Figure
Mifune’s Kikuchiyo comes across initially as a cartoonish figure, but in many ways he is the emotional heart of Kurosawa’s film, an orphaned peasant and would-be samurai who embodies the conflicts the film so deftly explores.
Likewise, Yōsuke Kubozuka’s often comedic portrayal of the tortured turncoat Kichijiro stands as one of the keys to Silence. A traitor whose willingness to symbolically trample Christ becomes a willingness to sell out other people, Kichijiro nonetheless cannot shake the reality of his guilt and, knowing that only God’s mercy can heal him, is desperate, even greedy, for Confession. His faith in God’s mercy, at times seemingly presented for comedic effect, has a transformative effect on Fr Rodrigues.
When we first meet Kichijiro he is filled with self-loathing, hating himself for having once denied Christ in a ritual which entailed him pressing his foot on a fumi-e, a metal plaque depicting Christ. He confesses his sin to Fr Rodrigues, shortly before being put in a position where the only way of saving his life is to do so again, which he does, unaware of how from a nearby hillside Fr Rodrigues is crying that it is alright to step on the image, while beside him Fr Garppe says the Christians must not do it.
Eventually, Fr Rodrigues, like Liam Neeson’s Fr Ferreira before him, must choose between stepping on a fumi-e or allowing others to be tortured and martyred. Although the muddied brozen plaque is ultimately a thing and not Christ himself, Fr Rodrigues is still resistant, until he hears – or believes himself to hear – Christ himself speak, saying that he is there to be trampled on.
It is as though the idol has become an icon, a window to God’s own reality, and a reminder that in a sense each one of us is an icon of Christ. “Insofar as you neglected to do this to one of the least of them, you neglected to do it to me,” Jesus prophesises the Son of Man saying on the last day to those who failed to help the hungry, the naked, and the imprisoned – by implication, allowing Japanese Christians to be tortured would be allowing Christ himself to be tortured.
It is understandable, therefore, that Fr Ferreira – dressed in Japanese robes that echo perhaps the most famous of the mentor roles he has made his own in recent years, that of the Jedi master Qui Gon Jinn in the Star Wars prequels – calls this “the most painful act of love that you have ever before done”.
Understandable, yes, but still not obvious, and if one wants to be told whether that was the right thing to do, the film offers no easy answers. Nor should it: films are every bit as much as novels machines for generating interpretations.
Death
The final section of the film, detailing Fr Rodrigues’ last decades in Japan – his character is based on the historical figure of Fr Giuseppe Chiara who likewise apostasised and lived in Japan until his death in 1685 – is tonally very different from the rest of the film, and a lesser director could have left it out, based as it is on the book’s closing appendix.
Peter Jackson, after all, made that decision with his adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, skipping the anticlimactic ‘Scouring of the Shire’ sequence because it hurt the grand narrative he wanted to tell, and in doing so omitting Tolkien’s central point that the destruction of the Ring did not mean the end of evil, because original sin lies in every mortal heart.
The closing sequence shows how though Fr Ferreira had rationalised and attempted to embrace his apostasy even then his thread of faith can still be twitched, and more importantly shows Fr Rodrigues passing through his apostasy, being shown by the faithful failure Kichijiro a new way of loving God.
A natural companion to The Mission and Black Robe, Silence is far from an easy film to watch, but as a study of doubt and uncertainty it looks destined to be a profoundly important one, and one that has much to say to us in an age where the rationalising of disbelief is so common, and where Christians face persecution on a scale not seen in centuries.