150 Word Review: 'Silence' (2016)
Sins of the father
Director Martin Scorsese’s Silence is a beautiful, harrowing, achingly sad drama about the ecstasy and agony of faith, directed by a 74-year-old master challenging himself as a filmmaker. Silence tells the historical story of Portuguese apostate priests in Japan: in the 17th century, the once-isolated nation was besieged by greedy European powers, including the Catholic Church.
The two leads, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, play priests on an Apocalypse Now-style mission to infiltrate Japan to discover what had happened to their mentor, a Jesuit played by Liam Neeson. The rumors were that he had renounced Christianity under torture. Garfield, especially, is mesmerizing, but both he and Driver balance innocence, arrogance, and passion as true believers. They are, however, unfairly burdened by what are supposed to be Portuguese accents but sound like cartoon Italian. Issey Ogata’s Inquisitor Inoue is polite and reasonable, even when he’s burning devout Catholics alive on pyres.