Silence Review

Scorsese spent twenty eight years trying to make Endo's novel, and the finished film carries that patience in every frame. Rodrigo Prieto shoots Taiwan standing in for Nagasaki in fog, rain and sea spray, with long held wide shots in which the priests are tiny figures on a hostile coast, and the composition does the theological work: God's silence is rendered as landscape.

There is almost no score, and the sound design of surf, insects and wind is as considered as the images. It is the best looking film Scorsese has made. Andrew Garfield's Rodrigues is a boy's faith tested into something harder, Issey Ogata's Inquisitor is a courteous, reasonable monster and the film's best performance, and Yosuke Kubozuka's Kichijiro, the serial apostate who keeps coming back for confession, is its moral center.

The reservations are real. At 161 minutes the film repeats its central ordeal, capture, offer, refusal, until the repetition becomes the argument, and the argument was clear an hour earlier. Garfield's accent wanders, Adam Driver is gone for most of the second half, and the closing image answers a question the film had earned the right to leave open. A severe, sincere film that is easier to admire than to love, with cinematography no other American film that year came near.