Silence (2016)

SILENCE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Martin Scorsese
    Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson,
    Issei Ogata, Yoshi Oida, Ciarán Hinds
Martin Scorsese's meditation on faith and suffering, about two Portuguese missionaries who go to 17th-century Japan to look for a colleague who may be dead or lost. It took Scorsese years to get the movie made, and it's not hard to see parallels with "The Last Temptation of Christ" and Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". It even has crucifixions - there's a lot of torture - and the images of Christ that keep coming up are mostly Christ crowned with thorns or Christ on the cross. It's long, slow, beautiful to look at, and for anybody who doesn't share Scorsese's preoccupation with old-school Catholicism and the concept of salvation through martyrdom, kind of dull. There's no room for comic relief - zealots rarely find anything funny - and the impact might be greater if the roles of the lead actors were reversed. Andrew Garfield has the much bigger part, but Adam Driver has more charisma, combined with the gaunt, ascetic look of somebody who might actually be a 17th-century man of the cloth. It's worth remembering that the church of these missionary priests was also the church of the Inquisition. Here the inquisitors are Japanese and the priests are the tortured, but the effect is the same: institutionalized barbarism in the name of religion, a righteous sense of purpose going hand in hand with unspeakable brutality.