Silence (2016)

As someone who finds the Catholic obsession with guilt and martyrs to be borderline incomprehensible if not actively repellent, this admittedly well-made film was something of a miss with me. Silence demands of its viewers some sort of relationship with the priests that I simply could not give it, and I was left mostly pondering the white saviour undertones, as well as that the Japanese were probably right to perceive Christianity as a dangerous cult.

Despite the mugging from both confessor and confessed, [one] exchange feels forced and comes across as a bid to lighten the gloom; if anything, it turns a feverish plea for absolution into a bit of vaudeville. There’s something uncomfortably and literally childlike about this child of God, who, like the other villagers, with their pleading eyes and hands, seems like a relic from a white-savior myth. Kichijiro, who enters grunting and twitching [and] grovels at the priest’s feet, also seems on hand as much for comic relief as for guidance.

— Manohla Dargis (The New York Times)

[Silence] fulfills one unspoken goal of its protagonist’s mission: to aestheticize and glorify experiences of guilt to the point that it elevates its bearer rather than debasing him.

[…]

It takes only the hint — which Silence does give us — of the homoeroticism of Rodrigues’s attachment to Christ, as well as to his fellow priests Ferreira and Garupe, to make one see how much the film’s notion of Christianity would be undermined by any attempt to take on these more embodied issues. The ethereality of this philosophical Catholicism thus comes to seem like a form of avoidance.

[…]

The cultural obliviousness of [some] gestures undercuts the film’s pretensions to reckon with this specific history of white colonization. It also underscores the viewer’s recurrent suspicion that, just as Father Rodrigues often seems more preoccupied with his own sense of self-worth than with the well-being of those around him, Silence is, at bottom, a film about the white man’s burden, rather than the burdens he places on others.

[…]

[The] film’s lack of a real critique of its white colonizers makes one struggle to find in it the kind of multicultural perspective it seems, at first, poised to offer. Scorsese’s long pans onto indifferent, gorgeously misty hills and the commoners suffering in squalor amid them inevitably end in close-ups of Garfield’s handsome face, contorted with feeling. Those around the young priest might, at times, accuse him of arrogance and self-centeredness, but neither Rodrigues nor the film know how to escape it, except by having Rodrigues beat his breast about it occasionally. If this is Scorsese’s most philosophically ambitious and spiritually pure form of Catholicism, his film also inadvertently reveals its solipsism. The film fails at the very kind of empathy its missionaries supposedly aim to spread; Rodrigues cannot feel the pain of the Japanese Christians whom he sees tortured and killed, except as their pain provokes, or mirrors, his own suffering.

— Marta Figlerowicz (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Scorsese’s film tests its audience with a picture that maintains an uncompromising austerity toward its purpose, yet it proves easier to appreciate than enjoy.

— Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review)