A revered director, afforded a big budget, takes on a subject of profound significance – it promised so much. Being a non-religious person, I was not so keen, and, as one who has been more frequently underwhelmed than not by Martin Scorsese’s movies (Taxi Driver the exception), I was not entirely surprised by how turgid and monotonous his latest magnum opus is. There is a hubristic self-consciousness in some filmmakers’ work that never lets you relax into the flow of the story, because you are always being reminded of the really important point being made. They feel that they need to spell it out for you. The delivery of the lesson being imparted being as slow as a wet weekend doesn’t help the cause, but more telling in its lack of engagement is the tedious manner in which faith – in this case Christianity – is talked and talked and talked about. I just wanted to shout at one point, ‘Okay, Martin, I get it!’ Japan in the 1640s was no place for the followers of Jesus. Through trade, the British, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish were all competing for economic influence and with their incursions they brought a new religion that was at odds with the established Buddhism. It was banned and those who had converted to it cruelly persecuted. A Jesuit missionary (Liam Neeson – is any actor more given to mental anguish?) has apostatised and gone native (a sort of clerical Colonel Kurtz). Two young priests, Rodrigues and Garupe (Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver), are sent to find him. From then on it is a litany of suffering and sacrifice as weepy Rodrigues’s endless internal verbiage wrestles with the agony and the ecstasy of his own spirituality. I loved Issei Ogata as the inquisitor, but the drab blue palette makes your eyelids heavy, a pop-psych analysis of the Japanese temperament disappoints and, quite frankly, the navel gazing bored me to tears. At over two-and-a-half hours, it is at least forty minutes too long.
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