Martin Scorsese repays his fans’ faith with his most rewarding film in years – but Passengers is a slight tale of lust in space
Neither cinemagoers nor awards voters made much noise about Silence (Studiocanal, 15), though that was to be expected. If Martin Scorsese’s long-cherished, serenely austere passion project had been an easy sell, it wouldn’t have taken him over a quarter of a century to develop. Two hours and 40 minutes of 17th-century Jesuit priests suffering for their faith in feudal Japan is a pitch itself designed to test the religiosity of Scorsese worshippers. The reward for those who persist, however, is the director’s most nourishing, complex work of the current century – a ravishing antidote to the emptier fever and spectacle of his last few films.
Some have described Silence as a Catholic artist’s pious, white saviour assertion of devotion at the expense of a Japanese perspective, which doesn’t at all square with the rich, knotty film I saw, with its generous but conflicted sympathies. There is as much admiration here for the naive Portuguese missionaries (led by a puppy-eyed Andrew Garfield, right), tasked with delivering Christianity in the isolationist Edo era, as there is sceptical concern. Likewise, the Japanese who submit and those who resist are regarded with equal understanding. Crafted with painstaking grace and performed with occasional, surprising barbs of wit, Silence isn’t a paean to a single religion, but a stark and stirring study of the very nature of belief and the variable conditions of its expression – a film in which no believer or nonbeliever quite emerges with the upper hand.
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Source: Guardian
