Film

“Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken our script?”

Lost temptation

Martin Scorsese’s Silence, or, How to Torture a Jesuit Priest Until He Says, “Ah, Screw It!” and Looks for Another Gig, is the auteur’s most inconsistent offering since his misguided and sloppy Casino.

It’s clear that Scorsese has poured his heart into the passion project, which makes it all the more sad that it doesn’t live up to his usual standard. The movie is far too long, and repetitive to the point where it becomes laughable rather than having the desired effect of moving the viewer. Based on the Shusaku Endo book, and a project Scorsese had been trying to mount since the ’80s, it’s nothing but a colossal waste of a great director’s time.

Bored to death is not what I expect to be during a Scorsese offering, but that’s what I was watching Silence. Two Jesuit priests, Rodrigues and Garrpe (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver), head to Japan in search of their mentor priest, Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Ferreira went missing during a prior mission years ago and is rumored to have gone into hiding as a civilian with a wife. The whole setup feels a bit like Apocalypse Now, minus the excitement, capable storytelling and fat Brando.

After the two priests split up on the search, the film basically becomes a series of scenes where Rodrigues witnesses atrocities against Japanese Christians being tortured by samurai trying to cleanse the country of Christianity. He watches men and women getting drowned, hung upside down, beheaded, etc. To Scorsese’s credit, the violence, while horrifying, is never gratuitous.

Garfield’s character is essentially a Christ figure reminiscent of Willem DaFoe in The Last Temptation of Christ. He’s being followed around

by what amounts to the film’s Judas, a guide named Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka). Kichijiro screws Rodrigues over repeatedly, constantly asking for confession, even getting paid in silver at one point. His actions almost feel like a running gag. The film does get better in its final act, when Rodrigues finally crosses paths with Ferreira. Neeson is so good in his scenes, you’ll wish he had shown up a little sooner. As for Garfield, for every scene where he’s powerful, there are others where he’s overwrought and feels slightly miscast. Driver is excellent, and the film might’ve benefited from him and Garfield switching roles. The movie isn’t without the typically great Scorsese flourishes. A scene where three men are tied to crosses in the ocean, continuously being pummeled by waves, is an absolute marvel. Rodrigues’ interrogation at the hands of an evil feudal Samurai governor (a creepy Issey Ogata) is mesmerSilence izing. Had Scorsese and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker 12345 Director: Martin Scorsese Starring: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson taken a pair of scissors to the film and brought it in under two hours, it might’ve done the movie a big favor. Let me take this moment to point out that I will sit through a five-hour movie if it is well done. Let me also point out that many movies that are 90 minutes long feel interminable and stretched out. Praise to the sound crew and camera work—as with all Scorsese films, they are exemplary. Scorsese grapples with faith and religion often in his films, most notably with the great The Last Temptation of Christ and the very good Kundun. Silence feels like a film with no limits set upon itself. Coupled with Steven Spielberg’s The BFG, Silence represents the second movie of 2016 by one of my very favorite directors to disappoint. (Silence is a 2016 release. It had a limited December run to qualify for awards.) It’s just another reason to hate 2016. With all the bad things I could say about Silence, I could also say good ones. I didn’t like the movie overall, but I feel like I should have and could have. Scorsese needed to rein himself in on this one. Ω

2A Monster Calls This is a well-meaning movie with good heart, but it was better when it was called TheIronGiant. J.A. Bayona’s film of the Patrick Ness book tells the tale of Conor (Lewis MacDougall), a young boy whose mother (Felicity Jones) is dying. Conor is, understandably, having issues, not just with the impending loss of his mother, but bullies at school and a domineering grandma (Sigourney Weaver) he doesn’t quite understand. When things come to a boil, a tree monster (voice of Liam Neeson) shows up to offer guidance and tough love. MacDougall gives a respectable performance, as do Jones and Weaver, but the film never really works as a whole. The relationship between the boy and the imaginative monster never makes much sense, so the human interactions wind up being far more interesting. Problem is, this movie is called AMonsterCalls, and much of the film leans on the effectiveness of the monster scenes.

4Hidden Figures Katherine Johnson was part of a segregated division at NASA in the ’50s, a wing of mathematicians who did the work that computers do today. HiddenFiguresdepicts the humiliation she and two other historical African-American figures, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, went through while solving equations that helped put men safely into space. The women had to put up with a lot of racist bullshit, and the film shows their hardships, albeit in PG fashion. Taraji P. Henson plays Johnson, the “smart one” astronaut John Glenn personally demanded check the coordinates before his historical flight launched. Octavia Spencer is her usual great self as Vaughan, doing the work of a supervisor without the title and curious about that new IBM thing they just installed down the hall. Vaughan would become crucial to the implementation of computers at NASA, as well as being the agency’s first African-American supervisor. As Jackson, NASA’s first female African-American aeronautical engineer, singer Janelle Monae is so good, it’s easy to forget that this is just her second movie role. As a composite, fictional character named Al Harrison, Kevin Costner does some of his best acting in years.

5La La Land This is an all new, original musical from director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) that’s surprisingly low on melodrama while full of vibrancy, beautiful tunes, outstanding set pieces and a stunning sense of realism for a movie where the characters bust out singing. It’s the best original movie musical ever made. The story follows wannabe actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz composer Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they try to make it in crazy Los Angeles. They meet, they don’t like each other much at first, but then they fall in love, which provides Chazelle and his performers ample opportunities for musical numbers that surprise at every turn. This solidifies Gosling as one of the best actors of his generation. He can wow you with insightful indies and carry big-budget blockbusters. Now, with LaLaLand, he takes his game to a new level. He proves he can pretty much do anything when it comes to movie characters. He can sing and dance with the best of them. Stone doesn’t just make her mark with a beautiful voice and expert footwork—she embodies the character with the honest and almost tragic drive to “make it” in the business.

2Live By Night Director Ben Affleck’s latest is a period piece/costume drama that looks like a lot of work went into it but never feels like a cohesive picture. Affleck also stars as Joe Coughlin, one of those gangsters you just gotta love, fighting the gangster fight during Prohibition in sunny Florida. Joe rises to the top of the gangster field, despite being the son of a cop (Brendan Gleeson), and despite basically being an all-around good guy. The problem here is that Affleck fails to give his central character a true identity and emotional toolbox. The character feels stilted, and the movie around him feels like a costume party. It’s as if Affleck is afraid to make him the truly bad guy he should be. The fedoras and sweet suits all look good, but it’s in the service of a story that has been told before in far more powerful fashion. Sienna Miller is good as Joe’s early love, and Elle Fanning, who had a great year with The NeonDemonand 20thCenturyWomen, is also good as a disgraced actress who finds a new career in preaching. Again, the movie looks good, and Affleck’s performance is OK, but the story feels like a rehash of every gangster movie ever made.

2Passengers Two of Hollywood’s biggest, most lovable stars labor away in the pretty but dumb Passengers, a movie that doesn’t have the guts to be as ugly as it should be. Chris Pratt plays Jim Preston, a mechanic dedicated to starting a life on a distant planet. He and 5,000 other passengers are in suspended animation aboard a ship taking a 125-year journey. That ship has an unfortunate encounter with a meteor shower, and Jim’s sleeping pod awakens him … with 90 years to go on the trip. What to do, what to do, what to do? Jim gets it into his mind to do a very bad thing, and that’s when Jennifer Lawrence’s character comes into play. The movie is good-looking for sure, and I really liked the design of the ship. That’s essentially what’s keeping Passengersfrom getting my lowest rating. That, and the fact that Jennifer Lawrence really can act, even when she’s in a junk-food movie. Passengerswon’t frustrate you so much for what it is, as for what it could have been. Imagine if somebody like Stanley Kubrick got ahold of this premise. Oh man, that would’ve been a movie to be reckoned with. This could’ve been one of the sickest science fiction epics since Alien.

4Patriots Day The latest collaboration between director Peter Berg and actor Mark Wahlberg, PatriotsDay, stands as not only a valuable tribute to the victims and heroes of the Boston Marathon bombings, but a solid, meaningful, gritty look at what it took to take down the terrorist Tsarnaev brothers. Wahlberg plays Sgt. Tommy Saunders, another one of those fictional composite characters that often show up in historical dramas. You may forgive this kind of artistic license, because the goal of PatriotsDayis to take you through the entire drama, from the bombing itself, through to the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff) inside a boat in somebody’s backyard. There probably wasn’t a single person who was at all of the events leading to the ultimate capture of the final living suspect in the bombings. It’s best to just view the Wahlberg character as a partial representation of the heroism and diligence that led to that arrest. This is the second of two Berg/Wahlberg collaborations in 2016, and it’s a good one. The film is about heroes, the heroes who worked to find the perpetrators, and the selfless, persevering heroes who were standing close to an explosive device when it went off.

4Rogue One: A Star Wars Story There was a quick little moment in the very first StarWars(now known as StarWarsEpisodeIV:ANewHope) where a character mentions rebels possibly obtaining vulnerability secrets regarding the Death Star. That group of people actually gets their own movie in RogueOne:AStarWarsStory, a StarWarsspinoff that’s technically another prequel. In fact, it tells a story that leads right up to where ANewHopebegins. It’s also a little different from your typical StarWarsmovie in that it doesn’t mainly deal with the Skywalker saga—although a couple of them make notable appearances—and doesn’t prominently feature the John Williams score (although that makes some appearances, as well). Director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla) goes for something a little different here, a tonal shift that reminds of the big change TheEmpireStrikesBack brought to the saga. Felicity Jones is terrific as Jyn, a woman who finds herself with strange ties to the Death Star, and becomes part of the effort to destroy it.