The Silence of God

Martin Scorsese described the dominant the theme of the novel Silence by the Catholic Japanese writer Shusaku Endo in the introduction to the Picador edition that was published to coincide with the release of Scorsese’s film adaptation:

Silence is the story of a man who learns—so painfully—that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realise, and that He is always present … even in His silence. For me, it is the story of one who begins on the path of Christ and who ends by replaying the role of Christianity’s greatest villain, Judas. He almost literally follows in his footsteps. In so doing, he comes to understand the role of Judas. This is one of the most painful dilemmas in all Christianity … Endo looks at the problem of Judas more directly than any other artist I know.

This problem is nothing new. The writers of the medieval mystery plays wondered how, if Judas was fulfilling God’s design in betraying Christ, he could still be damned. They resolved the predicament by having Judas despair that God could forgive so great a betrayal; and despairing of God’s mercy is a mortal sin. This made for great drama, but was terrible theology.

Shusaku Endo’s religious conundrums in Silence are far more complex. Part epistolary novel and part detective story, the narrative portrays the adventures of two Portuguese Jesuits, Fr Rodrigues and Fr Garupe, as they make their way to Japan in 1637 and 1638 after the suppression of Christianity. The two priests seek news of their old mentor Fr Ferreira, a famous missionary, who is reported to have apostatised. They are guided in their quest by Kichijiro, a Japanese who may have been a Christian. He finds a village that is still practising a form of Christianity which is in desperate need of a priest to administer the sacraments. Kichijiro is the Judas figure. He betrays the priests and his faith repeatedly, then begs for absolution. Both priests expect martyrdom but Inoue, their principal antagonist, spares them but tortures the villagers. When Rodrigues is betrayed and captured he sees his path as the same as Christ’s. But to save his fellow Christians he must renounce his faith. In one of the best late appearances in a novel since Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Rodrigues is urged to apostatise by his old mentor Fr Ferreira. Throughout, both men are obsessed by the Silence of God in the face of this suffering.

Martin Scorsese and his regular collaborator Jay Cocks’s script follows the novel closely; but Scorsese has gone further. The original may concentrate on Rodrigues’s internal struggles, but as well there are beautifully placed passages of description. The darkness in their hiding places becomes virtually a character in the story. For these sequences Scorsese used a digital process that enabled him to work in very low light and retain clarity. Sequences are illuminated by flares of yellow light from the torches of the villagers. At other times we can just see the priests’ faces in the shadows.

Scorsese could not find a suitably bleak seaside location in Japan for the pounding of the waves that dominate early passages of the book. But he found settings in Taiwan that correspond exactly to the repeated insistence by characters, such as Inoue, that Japan is a swamp in which Christianity cannot take root.

Scorsese is a great student of cinema and often quotes from the classics—a guilty pleasure in viewing a Scorsese movie is recognising the allusions to other films. In Hugo he duplicates a shot from Citizen Kane and remakes some Lumiere short films. Scorsese also relishes using technology to create spectacular effects. With Silence, however, he is much more restrained. There is one spectacular top shot early in the film but the visual style is much more austere than anything we have seen from him before. Individual shots are composed simply. The special features on the newly released DVD include film of an on-set moment when Scorsese gestures at the monitor and says, “We’ll have to take this back.”

The visual style evokes Japanese art but without the flattened perspective, with some set-ups having considerable depth of field as Scorsese interacts with his locations. He is definitely not playing safe. There is a delightful discussion between him and his regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, on the special features, about how he covered a major crowd scene in one master shot without protecting himself with different set-ups, and the editing throughout is far simpler than in his other films. Even the powerful sequence showing the crucifixion in the surf of three of the Christian villagers is covered in a few beautifully framed shots.

Scorsese’s reputation enabled him to take his pick of the best Japanese actors in the business. Playing in halting English and Japanese, Issei Ogata creates a superbly feline Inoue, the Chief Magistrate and Inquisitor. Not in the book is the touch of comedy Ogata brings to the part which serves to make the character even more menacing. Nearly as good is Tadanobu Asano as the Interpreter, who acts as a cruel tempter in Inoue’s plan to get Fr Rodrigues to apostatise. Yosuke Kubozuka’s Kichijiro has been compared to Toshiro Mifune’s young samurai in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. They are very different characters, but the distinctively Japanese style of dark physical comedy they employ is similar and much to Kubozuka’s credit.

Dominating the film is Andrew Garfield’s Fr Rodrigues. He creates an intense and believable relationship with his brother in Christ, Fr Garupe, sensitively played by Adam Driver. Their early ministry to the villagers is portrayed in great detail and resonates throughout a very long film. Both of them worked with Silence’s religious adviser, who was, like the characters, a Jesuit priest. It is because of this very detailed work that when Garupe chooses to die with the persecuted Christians the scene, shot very economically in long shot, has the impact it does. As Rodrigues faces the terrible reality that what seems to be the path of Christ leads to apostasy and throughout this ordeal God is silent, a painfully emaciated Garfield embodies rather than enacts the character’s anguish.

The climax comes when Rodrigues finally meets Ferreira, played splendidly by Liam Neeson in arguably his finest performance. Again Scorsese films their interactions very simply, relying on the writing and the acting to recreate Endo’s paradox with a clarity that is more incisive than even in the parallel passages from the novel. The director includes one insertion to resolve an ambiguity in the original’s ending that is so good that Endo might have wished he had thought of it himself.

Soon after the book was published, Endo collaborated on the screenplay of a Japanese film based on his novel. The director and co-writer was Masahiro Shinoda. Like Scorsese he had been a flamboyant visual stylist who responded to the original with a pared-down visual austerity. “I wanted the camera to be absolutely straightforward,” Shinoda said at the time, “even something like a documentary … I wanted the camera to be dispassionate, to be a kind of universal eye.” There is a stillness and a silence that is lifted straight from the original. It is punctuated by the brilliant, dissonant score by Toru Takemitsu. (Scorsese evokes the silence described in the book but instead of conventional music orchestrates intricate aural patterns of natural sounds such a bird cries and crashing waves.)

The famous cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa desaturated the colours in the style of early woodblock prints and adopted a limited flattened perspective. Unlike the Scorsese version, there is no careful establishment of the environment. Rather Shinoda adopts a kind of visual shorthand with the necessary background suggested rather than explored. For all his talk of documentary this invests the work with a theatrical quality which is nicely integrated with the realism.

The opening sequences are wreathed in shadows, sometimes obscuring the performers. This was early days for night-for-night shooting and they were trying to be faithful to the novel. Though not as good as the performances Scorsese was to evoke from his performers nearly fifty years later, David Lampson and Don Kenny are very good as the priests, handling the shifts from English to Japanese with ease. Fascinatingly Ferreira is played by a heavily made-up Japanese actor, Tetsuro Tanba. This vital scene is played in two languages and, with the excellent titles, is very effective.

Generally in the first Silence the emphasis is more on the clash of wills between the missionaries and the officials than the religious conflict. One departure from the original is so good that it may have come from Endo himself. Rodrigues is tortured in the pit, so he can imagine the even greater suffering of the Christians being similarly tortured, until he betrays his calling.

But a new sub-plot seems to have come entirely from Shinoda. A Christian samurai and his loyal wife, Monica, are tortured in front of Rodrigues. In a sequence that could have come from one of the brutal samurai films of the period he is buried up to his neck while a horseman gallops back and forth until his wife apostatises. It prefigures the priest’s own trampling on the holy image. Notwithstanding his wife’s sacrifice the samurai is murdered and she is offered to the now apostate priest. The film concludes with their first union—a rape.

Reportedly Endo loathed this ending. It betrays the book’s insistence that God can be with you even in His silence; and there is nothing in the book or the film to suggest Rodrigues has been so degraded by his apostasy. A gentle union with his new wife would have worked dramatically, but this is unwarranted sadism. The scene is made even more disturbing when you know that Monica is played by Shima Iwashita, the director’s wife.

Nevertheless the first Silence is a considerable achievement; more a Shinoda film than an adaptation of a great work of literature. Martin Scorsese’s Silence, on the other hand, is masterwork by one of cinema’s great artists as well as a sensitive adaptation of an extraordinary work of literature.