Scorsese Breaks “Silence”
Martin Scorsese is finally making a film he’s been wanting to make for many years: a screen version of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence (1966).
Scorsese had originally planned to make Silence after Gangs of New York, but he chose to do The Departed instead.
Filming in New Zealand this year, Silence will feature Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro, and Gael Garcia Bernal — an all-star ensemble, if you ask me.
The novel tells the story of a young Portuguese Jesuit, Sebastião Rodrigues, who goes to Japan in search of his father in faith, Cristóvão Ferreira, who, it is said, has apostasized under the brutal persecutions of the Shogunate (persecutions that would soon lead to the closing of Japan to all contact with the outside world).
It’s not hard to see why this story fascinates Scorsese — violence, faith, doubt, betrayal come together in a tale that is shot through with a deeply Catholic “tragic sense of life.”
The film will be released in 2010. It will be tough to watch, but I’m willing to bet that it will be one of Scorsese’s best. I hope it will draw many people to the novel, a twentieth century masterpiece.
Scorcese, a former seminarian and self-described “lapsed Catholic,” is a brilliant director who can handle religious subjects well when he wants to. His “Kundun,” about the life of the Dalai Lama up to the start of his exile, is a wonderful film that gives a vivid and respectful treatment of Buddhism. I’ll be frank, however, that I didn’t like Scorcese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and that worries me about how he’ll handle Endo’s masterpiece and its many nuances. He’s got two Academy Award winning actors in the main roles, but if Scorcese decides to film “Silence” as a moneymaker that will please Hollywood’s secular tastes, then he’ll have done great damage to a great book.
The “Last Temptation” ruffled as many clerical sensibilities as a certain “Last Tango” but watching it in the hushed contemplative quiet of a Tokyo cinema I found it has some evangelical qualities. Its treatment of St Paul was an excellent rendering of the Kazantzakis original.
“Silence” is a great novel, translated into English by my good friend Fr Bill Johnston, now suffering his own enforced silence in a long illness. There is an opera based on it, but it cries out for fullscale movie treatment. It opens a window into that astonishing and enigmatic Christian Century in Japan which leaves many questions in the readers mind. I wonder how he will handle the climax, where Christ speaks to the apostate trampling the fumie: Trample, trample, it is for this that I came into the world.
The point is that the apostate is motivated by compassion for others who are being tortured. This is very timely in light of US practices in Bagram et., — yes, and even in countries to which they had renditioned unfortunates — supposedly with assurances from those countries that “we don’t torture” — in reality with the intention of following their victims there and torturing them themselves.
While I have enjoyed “Silence” immensely (I’ve read it twice), I think “Samurai” is better written and tells a broader story of similar events.
Either would make a good movie, but I think “Silence” will be more appealing to the kind of audience that will see it.
I predict that this will be another “Passion of the Christ” debacle.
The violence and ethnic backlash will threaten to overshadow the spiritual elements of the movie in the secular press as it did with Gibson’s film. (Though I don’t mean to put Mad Max on a par with Scorsese as a film maker.)
Some books deserve to remain undiddled by Hollywood. “Silence” is one of them.
I’ll chime in with Jimmy Mac: I thought Silence was very good, but I thought The Samauri was even better. Perhaps it is because it reflects Endo’s own experience of getting baptized, as it were, “accidentally” (i.e. for all the wrong reasons) and then having to live with the consequences. Endo has a short story on this same theme, “My Belongings,” which is in the collection Stained Glass Elegies..
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