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(Spoilers abound, obvi.)
From Sean Burns:
"The adoration of such totems — "this religion of things" — at first troubles Garfield’s Father Rodrigues, who narrates the film via letters home that start out clouded thick with condescension. He refers to the locals as “wretches,” but reserves the lion’s share of his disdain for their drunken guide Kichijiro — a comedic shambles played in fine, Toshiro Mifune-style by Yōsuke Kubozuka. Like most of Rodrigues’ assessments, these are all incredibly short-sighted and he’s going to wind up paying dearly for them before the movie’s done.
Lenny Bruce had a great routine about how missionaries couldn’t help but wind up kinda believing that they’re God, and it’s not for nothing that Scorsese has outfitted the preening Garfield with a gorgeously flowing mane straight out of a Cecil B. DeMille Biblical epic. Rodrigues hilariously sees a painting of Jesus staring back from his reflection in a puddle of water, and if “The Last Temptation of Christ” was about a holy man struggling to accept that he's God, “Silence” is about a holy man struggling to accept that he’s just a man, and a fallen one at that. (In other words, this is a Martin Scorsese picture.)
Rodrigues gets broken down by the best, though. The second half of “Silence” is a series of harrowing, dialectic conversations with a deliciously slithering head inquisitor (Issey Ogata) and his translator (Tadanobu Asano from “Ichi the Killer”) whose very smile feels like an act of violence. What is this arrogance that inspires white men to journey to lands unknown and inflict their beliefs on poor people whose language they can’t even be bothered to learn? A deeply religious film with no interest in winning converts nor preaching to the converted, “Silence” just asks us to sit with some troubling history, provoking and prodding until we arrive at our own conclusions."
From Amy Nicholson:
"Scorsese keeps Rodrigues ignorant, too. When he's captured by the Japanese leaders, all wizened men two and three times his age, they realize that this crusader is a dummy. "We do have a better grasp of your language than you have of ours," snips his interpreter, not hiding his condescension. They've studied his tongue and his church, and concluded that they don't see the need for new ideas like Hell. But Rodrigues is so arrogant in his own beliefs that he hasn't extended them the same courtesy. He has simply written off Buddhism as wrong, dividing the world into Catholics and savages. "Only a Christian would see Buddha simply as man," sighs the interpreter. "You are ignorant, padre."
The more Rodrigues shuts his ears to talk over them, the more rude and insolent he sounds. (Although I can imagine someone watching the same scene and thinking him brave.) "We have brought you the truth!" he shouts, Garfield delivering the line with volume and conviction and zero evidence, the equivalent of an all-caps "BELIEVE ME!" Rodrigues wants his Japanese captors to make him a martyr — there's honor in dying. But they refuse to even let him face off against a proper villain, a cruel tyrant like King Herod or Emperor Nero. Instead, the Inquisitor Inoue (Ogata) who controls Rodrigues's fate is charming and reasonable and exasperated by the priest's stubbornness. Inoue's almost too goofy for the movie — he sticks out his ass when he walks and has the slithering accent of a cartoon snake. He makes Rodrigues seem like a bore who's crashed his cocktail party. Finally, after Rodrigues gives a passionate speech that sounds like it should end in violins and applause, Inoue and the elders giggle and walk away. This moron isn't worth their time.
Whether Silence is worth its daunting 161-minute running time depends on what truths you bring to it. It's possible to watch Silence and see a story about saints martyred by an oppressive government. It's also possible to see a told-you-so parable about imperialists who should have stayed home. I suspect Scorsese would be a little disappointed by either conclusion. But he stays quiet because he wants to challenge the audience to go deeper inside themselves, to separate our own religion (or lack of one) from the faith that guided us to it. No matter what you believe, we've all drawn our conclusion from the same evidence — which is to say, there hasn't been any. And maybe that's enough, just like it has to be for Rodrigues, who spends the film praying to a Jesus who doesn't answer, and then simply listens to his own conscience and makes the best decision he can."
Finally, a lengthy chunk from a really great writer I follow on Letterboxd, who goes by Aleph Null, and whose whole review can be found here: http://letterboxd.com/aleph_null/film/silence/1/
"1. i really understand why people read scorsese as lionising rodrigues & garrpe’s work but what i perceived was intense rage against the system, against the dependency they foster through the limitation of sacramental administrations & the desperation they implicitly encourage in kakure kirishitans for white european mediators to god. even besides their refusal to learn japanese, their unwillingness to learn local religious traditions, their assumptions that any resistance must be purely religious in nature—rodrigues doesn’t flinch one bit when a japanese lady crouch-bows before him, in stark contrast with angels who frantically refuse worship (revelation 19.10, 22.9). i saw so much acknowledgement of how the missionaries dehumanise japanese people, both christian and otherwise—referring to them as ‘creatures’, fetishising their endurance of suffering as innate, relying on their suffering on order to avoid their own; in general, keeping in line with european perceptions of the ‘childlike races’. maybe this is because i’m soakedly familiar with so much traditional christian behaviour and can’t help but read it, even when portrayed positively, as emotionally abusive—but in this case i don’t see any praise of any ‘free-thinking’ western world, nor any ‘gentleness’ associated with the west, any more than an emotionally abusive person could be called gentler than a physically abusive one. endo’s novel was acutely aware of every orientalist microaggression on the part of the priests; i honestly have a hard time reading this film any differently.
b. i strongly object to the idea that inoue’s resistance to christianity is depicted as being purely for religious reasons. he explicitly explains to rodrigues that the ban on christianity is on account of its use as a wedge by competing european traders. i know critics argue that this explanation is sidelined in favour of other narratives, but when rodrigues suggests in response that japan be bound (as in marriage) only to the church, not to any of the european powers, inoue sighs very exaggeratedly—i think the sigh & shot are held for about fifteen seconds—and it feels very, very clear (to me, at least) that scorsese finds this gesture expressly significant. not the villainous sigh of someone out-argued, but the exhausted, exasperated sigh of someone fed up with rodrigues’s naïveté, and priests’ in general. how can you put forth a reasonable position to someone so clueless? how can you try to explain emotional abuse on a national scale to someone who refuses to connect the dots? it’s clear that he couldn’t get this through to ferreira either—ferreira’s almost certainly a fake apostate, and the ideas that japan is a swamp, that kakure kirishitans’ syncretism makes them not true christians, etc., are very clearly not inoue’s. they’re ferreira’s, repackaged and sold back to him, so he can express at least some conviction in his supposedly apostate set of beliefs.
iii. it’s of great importance that the fumie given to rodrigues is not just of christ but of christ crucified. treading on the fumie, for rodrigues, is not only about disrespecting christ—i’d guess not even chiefly. it’s trampling on his own dreams of suffering glory, giving up his idea of christlike loving sacrifice, and with it the crown of martyrdom. this is not unique in christian history; many early christian groups prized martyrdom so highly that members engaged in a kind of bloodlust for their own blood. in one famous story, the source for which i cannot remember right now but i promise i will link when i find it again, a whole gaggle of second-century christians swarmed to a local governor’s office, asked to be executed, and were very upset when he told them it couldn’t be done. but rodrigues clearly does not universalise this bloodlust. he alone is worthy of it. he, unlike garrpe, encourages the kirishitans to trample on the fumie—he’s not as interested in their receipt of any martyrs’ crown, or any internal struggle they might have. the fact that he exhorts them, without hesitation, to trample, but finds it so hard to trample (his own dreams) even when directly told ‘the price for your glory is their suffering’, even as he grows angrier with kichijiro, is not at all commendable." My movies: http://russellhainline.com
My movie reviews: https://letterboxd.com/RussellHFilm/
My beer TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thebeertravelguide
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