“Silence” comes to us billed as 30 years in the making. Unfortunately, it plays like 30 years in the watching.
Set in 17th-century Japan, Martin Scorsese’s long, low-energy picture is neither an immersive, arty experience (like the films of Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson or Alejandro González Iñárritu) or an old-school Hollywood adventure. Mostly it’s just a slog as two Portuguese Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, each of whom seems to have stumbled into the wrong century) search for a colleague (Liam Neeson) who went missing and might have been tortured to death for his Christianity or might have converted to Japanese Buddhism.
Garupe (Driver) and Rodrigues (Garfield), hidden from authorities by a group of devout Japanese Christians (missionaries had previously succeeded in persuading some 300,000 Japanese to join the Church, we’re told), can’t show their faces lest they be captured and painfully executed. Scorsese’s principal interest is in staging various scenarios of agonizing death — water, fire or being bled out drop by drop while hanging upside down — while enforcers demand the victims renounce Christ. The consonance with Scorsese’s gangster movies is hard to miss: say the words, betray the boss, and do yourself a favor.
Unlike with the Mob, though, there is a way out of Christianity. The film’s powerful central motif, repeated so often it becomes an anti-liturgy, is Christians being ordered to step on an engraving of Jesus Christ to signify renunciation. Yet until the last 45 minutes, which include a galvanizing discussion of whether Christianity could work in Japan and a riveting moment of choice for one of the priests, the film is rudderless. Long, stale scenes lacking Scorsese’s trademark kinetic camera work don’t advance the narrative, lean on workmanlike dialogue (“Why are you so calm? We are all about to die!”) and aren’t even especially evocative.
Scorsese’s preoccupation with bodily scarification seems to overwhelm, or perhaps even define, his interest in Christ: The film raises the question of why anyone would risk his life for the Church. After the Japanese (inexplicably) change tactics and try to use persuasion as well as coercion to sway the Jesuits, even the highly charged debate between Rodrigues and his inquisitor (the strangely captivating Issei Ogata) reminded me of how Scorsese approached the same questions so much more dynamically in “The Last Temptation of Christ.” To that masterpiece, this one feels like a superfluous addendum.