REVIEW: SILENCE (dir. Scorsese)

'These early scenes, fraught with peril, are as tight with distrust and paranoia as anything in The Departed,and yet they are also unexpectedly moving. Shot often by guttering candle-light, shrouded in mist and shadow, we examine muddy but hopeful faces faces rendered beautiful by the simple quality of devotion, see hands clasping hands, exchanging crosses — the images as simple and transfixing as those of Albrect Durer. “Christ did not die for the good and beautiful, he died for the miserable and corrupt,” says Rodrigues, an article of Jesuit faith that could also encompass Scorsese’s own rogue’s gallery of sinners over the years... For all of Hollywood’s flimsy bromides to the “triumph of the human spirit,” the genuine article is a much more elusive creature. Yet here it is — stubborn, wily, unbeautiful — running right through this film like piano wire. Scorsese owes the world only one thing: his sincerity. With some of his recent work Scorsese has seemed a great filmmaker in search of the grand obsession that pushed his earlier films into existence. Silence is the first film of his in a long time that feels born of that pressure — like it needs to exist. The result feels like something close to a state of grace.'— From my review for Newsweek