Thanks, I Hate It: Silence

I love Martin Scorsese. Casino is one of the best films ever made; I’m dying to watch The Irishman; no one is better than Marty at using voice-over to add to a scene rather than just explain it. Taxi Driver, The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas, it just goes on and on and on. When I sat down to watch Silence I was ready to love it, ready to delve into Scorsese’s complicated relationship with Roman Catholicism and explore its fraught early contact with the insular Japanese culture of the 17th century. The movie delivers on that, but in such a fundamentally flawed way as to end up frustrating rather than revelatory.

Andrew Garfield is the most obvious problem here. As the young Portugese priest Rodrigues he has all the screen presence of a wet cat, whispery and emotionless. Even the film’s most tense and upsetting sequences are instantly derailed by his slack expression and ridiculous accent, a lisping drone that makes him sound more heavily medicated than sober or studious. Even more frustrating, Adam Driver does much better, more emotional work with similar material as the hot-tempered Garupe, his unusual features and sullen intensity a far more natural fit for the setting’s poverty and desperation than Garfield’s bland, antiseptically attractive deal.

The film’s images of martyrdom are both harrowing and thoughtful, balancing the priesthood’s fervor with a kind of half-repressed disdain for the Japanese converts they lead and a helpless, prideful terror in the face of the Shogunate’s campaigns of torture and repression. Believers are drowned, beaten, crucified, burned — it’s horrifying, genuinely difficult to watch, and Scorsese sets no stock in the comfort or value of unbroken faith, in the wheels of ritual and form which drive the massive engines of the church. More than anything this is what makes the film so infuriating, that with one slipped gear the entire thing just chugs in place. Every time it approaches sublimity we get Garfield’s sedated stare, or his mumbling narration.

Silence is an important education in the value of every member of a film’s cast and crew. A single mistake during casting can echo through the rest of production, destabilizing or even destroying a film. Watching it happen to a master of the art form is painful, and knowing that the film you’ve just slogged your way through could have been something truly great with just a little bit of necrotic tissue trimmed away is one of the most profoundly disappointing feelings I’ve experienced as a critic. This one looms large for me, and maybe always will.