The Strong Simplicity Of "Silence"

In the inter­view book Scorsese on Scorsese, dis­cuss­ing his 1984 film The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese talked about his reac­tion to people telling him Raging Bull was so visu­ally beau­ti­ful: “I decided my next pic­ture was going to be 1903 style, more like Edwin S. Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman, with no close-ups.” An eccent­ric decision, argu­ably, but one that it takes someone who is both a cinephile and a cine­aste to make. Scorsese then recounts Sergio Leone telling him at Cannes that The King of Comedy was Scorsese’s most “mature” film. “I don’t know if this was his way of say­ing he didn’t like it,” Scorsese muses. He con­tin­ues: “[O]ver the years my friends and I have had a run­ning joke about slow movies, where the cam­era doesn’t move, as being ‘mature.’ I read in the Village Voice that Jim Jarmusch , who made Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, said some­thing like ‘I’m not inter­ested in tak­ing people by the hair and telling them where to look.’ Well, I do want them to see the way I see. Walking down the street, look­ing quickly about, track­ing, pan­ning, zoom­ing, cut­ting and all that sort of thing. I like it when two images go togeth­er and they move. I guess it might not be con­sidered ‘mature,’ but I enjoy it.”

It’s worth remem­ber­ing that this por­tion of the book was recor­ded in the late 1980s, around the time that Scorsese was mak­ing Goodfellas. He has made almost twenty fea­tures since them, some fic­tion films, some doc­u­ment­ar­ies. He has also aged, of course. So maybe he’s “matured” in ways of which that he’s not aware. I still believe he’s com­mit­ted, as a film­maker, to shar­ing his vis­ion, the way he sees things, with the view­er. In his new film Silence he does so in a way that seems, at first view­ing, rather dif­fer­ent from his cus­tom­ary meth­od. In terms of cinema style, it’s a movie whose story seems rather simply told. And that’s true. But the sim­pli­city of the telling is the res­ult of a remark­able dis­til­la­tion. Everything that Scorsese knows about film­mak­ing is in this movie. Nothing that is unne­ces­sary to his vis­ion of both the nar­rat­ive and the ques­tions that inform it—no, that fuel it, with a con­sist­ent rest­less passion—is included here.

The open­ing title, with its sounds of nature fol­lowed by absence of sound, con­sti­tutes an argu­ably almost literal-minded demon­stra­tion of the movie’s theme, but that plain­ness is pur­pose­ful. The movie opens with a tense conversation—more than tor­ture and depred­a­tion, this movie is about verbal exchanges, what they can achieve and what they cannot—and after it con­clude in an interi­or set­ting, goes out­side, where a quiet but metic­u­lous eye-of-some-kind-of-God high angle shot of three priests des­cend­ing sets of out­door steps con­tex­tu­al­izes the place of this exchange in their imme­di­ate settings.

Yes, there is mov­ing cam­era in this movie—see the fol­low­ing scene, when Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe are led through the mar­ket­places and into a bust­ling inn to meet their constant-sinner guide to Japan, Kichijiro. The cam­era snakes with them though dank alley­ways. But there are cuts also; this cam­era move­ment is not of the sort that imme­di­ately awes with its vir­tu­os­ity, like the cel­eb­rated Copacabana track­ing shot in Goodfellas. (It’s import­ant to remem­ber that as much as crit­ics and ana­lysts and arm­chair film buffs get caught up in react­ing dir­ectly to that sort of style, Scorsese him­self is not a style-for-its-own sake film­maker. As he stated, he puts his films togeth­er to reflect how he sees things, and the Copacabana shot has the dra­mat­ic effect of impress­ing on the view­er just the kind of high life young Henry Hill was treat­ing him­self to on a flu­id and con­stant basis.

For all its atten­tion to detail in depict­ing the trap­pings of 17^th cen­tury life in is set­tings, Silence is shot and edited with a dir­ect­ness and imme­di­acy of the sort that Scorsese has not brought to bear on his pri­or peri­od films. The Age of Innocence, from its nar­ra­tion out­ward, applies a cine­mat­ic equi­val­ent of high lit­er­ary irony to its approach. Kundun has a detach­ment, a sense of the film­maker try­ing to find his way into the story, which yiel­ded a kind of magic-lantern magic real­ism. With The Last Temptation of Christ Scorsese has expli­citly stated he was try­ing to immerse him­self in a time­less feel­ing of antiquity, which led to the lib­er­al use of ultra-slow motion in some of its desert scenes. There is almost no slow-motion in Silence. One shot, anoth­er over­heard view that bobbles into an almost 360 degree view resolv­ing with a gor­geous sky­scape, of the boat to Japan mak­ing its way over the sea, is the only such shot I dis­cerned on a second view­ing of the movie. [UPDATE: It was poin­ted out to me after I pos­ted that OF COURSE there’s anoth­er, very prom­in­ent use of slow-motion, in one of the film’s most cru­cial scenes. Weirdly, it did not register for me as such both times I watched the movie, so had Scorsese built my will­ful sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief; it felt as if my eyes and ears were genu­inely regis­ter­ing it at the slower speed because that’s the speed at which it was actu­ally occur­ring, not that the film­maker had manip­u­lated those factors. Another exhib­it in favor of the film’s mas­tery, I reck­on.] (And of course the film is quite a bit dif­fer­ent ton­ally from Scorsese’s pri­or fic­tion fea­ture, The Wolf of Wall Street, whose high energy made it a little easy to ignore/miss its near-Swiftian rage, which Scorsese, who as an artist has always dis­trus­ted the per­spect­ive of the moralist—Travis Bickle was some­thing of a mor­al­ist as we recall—casts in the mode of sar­don­icism.) The dir­ect­ness brings home the movie’s ideas in a ter­rific­ally full-bodied way.

Scorsese the dir­ect­or lets the dia­logue of the screen­play, by him­self and Jay Cocks, really breathe, and gives his won­der­ful act­ors all kinds of room. One of the most cru­cial sequences is the con­ver­sa­tion between the frus­trated, but still possessed-of-his-wits, Rodrigues, and the inquis­it­or Inouye (a really mag­ni­fi­cent per­form­ance by Issei Ogata), in which the two bat around meta­phor­ic terms—“concubine,” “ugly woman,” “bar­ren woman”—in an argu­ment over wheth­er Japan needs, or can even bear, the Church. In its sta­ging and shoot­ing, it rather resembles a scene in Scorsese’s Casino in which a Western good-old-boy played by L.Q. Jones expresses some com­plaint to Robert De Niro’s casino boss Rothstein. Differences in cam­era place­ment aside, both scenes are simple shot/reverse shot exchanges in which Scorsese lets the verbal stresses determ­ine the cut­ting. In Casino, Jones’ char­ac­ter tells Rothstein, “You people will nev­er under­stand the way it works out here.” (!!!!) while in Silence Ogata pulls off a truly inspired and com­ic bit of act­ing by seem­ing to lit­er­ally deflate with dis­ap­point­ment at Rodrigues’ intransigence. People who insist on skep­ti­cism con­cern­ing the director’s role might argue that in both cases Scorsese was merely let­ting the act­ors do their jobs, but in these movies the view­er feels the judg­ment inher­ent in both the block­ing and the cut­ting that’s not present in the work of less inspired/conscientious film­makers. So too is there added value in the way Scorsese breaks up his frame with wooden beams, in the quick cuts in close up of Rodrigues as he begins to go mad (I ought to men­tion that second time around I appre­ci­ated Andrew Garfield’s layered per­form­ance a good deal more than the first), in the judi­cious use of dis­solves in the movie’s epi­logue. And of course the most vir­tu­oso film­mak­ing of the piece, the scene where Rodrigues comes to his most cru­cial decision. It’s just crush­ing, not least for the way it’s set up. Liam Neeson’s Ferreira, speak­ing to his former stu­dent of “a suf­fer­ing only you can end,” tells Rodrigues his sac­ri­fice will be “the greatest act of love ever per­formed,” and Rodrigues’ Japanese inter­pret­er (Tadanobu Asano, great) tells the priest, “It’s just a form­al­ity.” Which is it, for God’s sake? And then the soundtrack drops out for the second time.

There are stray scenes and shots in Silence that overtly recall those of Scorsese’s influ­ences, ment­ors, friends. (Scorsese has always been resource­ful in the way he uses his influ­ences; the close-up of Travis’ diary read­ing “they can­not touch her” is so per­fectly and aptly executed that one would nev­er have thought it was inspired by a similar—albeit very fleeting—shot in Contempt had Scorsese him­self not poin­ted it out.) The light­ing and col­or in the scenes in which the priests land in Japan have traces of Powell and Pressburger, spe­cific­ally of course Black Narcissus. The les­sons of Scorsese’s friend and col­lab­or­at­or Paul Schrader’s Big Three of “tran­scend­ent­al style,” Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, are all shown to have been fully absorbed here, but not always in expec­ted ways. The fog dur­ing the boat trip to Goto brought to mind Dreyer’s Vampyr, not an expli­citly reli­gious film in terms of theme but a strangely spir­itu­al one non­ethe­less. Some of the dual close-ups have a def­in­ite touch of Bergman. And the film’s final shot struck me as a macro-to-micro reverse of the last shot in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but of course it hearkens back to Citizen Kane as well. In the end Silence is remark­ably only itself, and a great film in a great film tradition.