Viewing Silence, the long-gestated passion project and film from Martin Scorsese, defies the typical movie-going experience. Movie reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz described it as “not the sort of film you ‘like’ or ‘don’t like.’ It’s a film that you experience and then live with.” Father James Martin, S.J., an advisor on the film, likened the act of watching Silence to “living inside of a prayer.” This powerful film demands participation in a scrupulous inquiry into the nature of faith and doubt, and their painful co-existence in the heart.
The plot follows the seventeenth-century journey of two Portuguese Jesuit priests, Father Rodrigues and Father Garupe, played heart-wrenchingly by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver. These two missionaries travel to Japan, seeking to serve a secret Catholic community under the harsh persecution of the imperial shogunate. While ministering, they also search for an old mentor, Father Ferreria (a compelling Liam Neeson), who is rumored to have abandoned the faith. The young Jesuits are eventually betrayed, imprisoned by the authorities and commanded to abandon their own faith. The promised punishment for continued Christian fidelity falls not on the priests, but on other captured members of their beloved Japanese Christian church.
For Catholic viewers, Silence offers no packaged “message” or meaning. Instead, the film compels viewers to stay in their seats while the credits roll, devoid of music, filled with only the sound of crashing surf, a near omnipresent motif in the movie. In the quiet that settles on the screen, Silence asks for a contemplative spirit, one that is willing to let unanswerable questions, stinging doubts and resilient prayer pour endlessly from the heart, washing into the world like waves onto a rocky Japanese shore.
