silence (w&d. scorsese, w. jay cocks)

In the final ten minutes of Silence we get a glimpse of what the film might have been like had it been made when its director was at his peak. From nowhere a narrator appears, a Dutch merchant. The story begins to be told through the interplay of narration and image. The acting complements the storytelling, rather than trying to drive it. The film isn’t dependent on reaching those minor climaxes which are now known as ‘beats’ in the language of screenwriting. Rather, the film finds its own pace, skipping over years of real time in minutes of film time, picking out details which elucidate the world the characters inhabit (16th century Japan). There’s no need to try to win the audience with a comic character; there’s a confidence and fluidity which the rest of the film, all two hours and a quarter, signally lacks. 

Why the rest of film cannot retrospectively follow in the footsteps of its ending is a mystery. The script feels like it has been assembled by robots, the acting feels as though it’s being performed by robots, the art design is uneven and prompts more questions than it answers, consistently leaving us wondering whether what we’re seeing has even a grain of authenticity or if this is all some Hollywood dream. Even the editing and camerawork, so often fallback staples of Scorsese’s work, feel lacklustre. There must be a metaphor lurking behind the decline of Scorsese as a filmmaker. Maybe it’s just old age. Maybe the industry has wrong-footed him. It certainly feels surprising that the script for Silence, supposedly a passion project of the director’s for decades, is quite so wooden. It smacks of unnamed figures being drafted in to “help”.  

I had missed Silence when it came out in London. But looking for a suitable English language film in Brasilia, it seemed like it might be a safe enough bet. The cinema was a third full. People munched popcorn with enormous vigour. No-one walked out. Whenever the comic character appeared, people laughed. Perhaps there was something that my take on the film had failed to grasp; after all it's no small feat to convince people around the world to munch their popcorn whilst watching an epic about Jesuit priests in medieval Japan. All the same, until we got to the last fifteen minutes, Silence never felt like a Scorsese film to me.