“Silence is a film about varieties of guilt, each of which is represented as a particularly Catholic and particularly white experience. Repeatedly confessed, but also continually accumulating, guilt in the film becomes the basis of an unbreakable, quasi-familial relationship with Christianity.”
“You can never become a perfect child of Christ, but you never stop seeing yourself as a Catholic, either. Silence also fulfills one unspoken goal of its protagonist’s mission: to aestheticize and glorify experiences of guilt to the point that it elevates its bearer rather than debasing him.”
“Based on a 1966 novel by the Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo, Silence tells a story set in the 1640s during Portugal’s heyday as a colonizing power. With other European rivals catching up to Portugal’s conquests in the New World and Asia, Lisbon continues to send Jesuit missions to Japan in hopes of converting some of its population to Catholicism, which would give them a political foothold in this otherwise hermetic country. Scorsese’s narrative follows the last two men who sail to Nagasaki as part of this missionary effort.”
“A multitude of well-known cultural tropes and narratives are woven together in this story as Scorsese tells it.”
“Silence echoes Apocalypse Now and Aguirre, the Wrath of God: it chronicles an epic journey of white men who aspire to become gods in a foreign land they do not understand, and it shows how that land’s inscrutable autonomy undoes them.”
“Scorsese’s film also bears a strong relation to the old Hollywood classic Quo Vadis, as well as to Mel Gibson’s more recent The Passion of the Christ. It depicts religious faith, and Christianity in particular, as a set of ideals that you can only prove to others by suffering or dying for them.”
“The linchpin that holds all of these tropes together is a pervasive ambiance of failure and inadequacy. Scorsese’s priests fail both as peaceful emissaries of Christ and as successful colonizers; they get blood on their hands without any new faithful recruits or any new business partners to show for it.”
“Scorsese’s vision of Catholicism reduces all human agency to such endless, and endlessly imperfect, efforts at grace.”
“How small an act of faith would suffice for God to decide to save you, after all you have done to reject him?”
“Silence returns again and again to this question without ever emerging with answer. In a way that (as The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane and others have observed) bears comparison to Robert Bresson, Scorsese thus attempts to give Catholicism a philosophical gravity that its flattened popular versions often lack.”
“Behind the religion’s hierarchical and ritualistic veneer, Silence earnestly asks how a commitment to Christian values can be preserved and proselytized, even when the believer is too weak to uphold them consistently.”
“This is an idealized and intellectualized vision of Catholicism, no doubt, and one that purposefully shunts off-screen much of the reactionary conservatism with which contemporary Catholics are often associated. Indeed, it takes only the hint — which Silence does give us — of the homoeroticism of Rodrigues’s attachment to Christ, as well as to his fellow priests Ferreira and Garupe, to make one see how much the film’s notion of Christianity would be undermined by any attempt to take on these more embodied issues. The ethereality of this philosophical Catholicism thus comes to seem like a form of avoidance.”
“Scorsese’s film likewise avoids the critique of colonialism that it at first seems to promise.”
“would not have been my answer. Vaguely guilt-ridden, I tried to imagine the pious response the film might have elicited in my Polish Catholic relatives. Silence would offer them a dramatic confirmation of their faith’s value.”
“The power with which it immerses viewers in its vast and misty religiosity is such that, in certain moments, even a cynic like myself can’t see her way beyond it. But once the lights go back on, one is relieved — or, at least, I was — to find that the only foggy hills around were those of Hollywood, and the only thing to confess was the failure to validate my parking ticket.”
“Marta Figlerowicz is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale and a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in n+1, Boston Review, Post45 (Contemporaries), Film Quarterly, and elsewhere.”