For the week of March 27th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing Martin Scorsese's Silence. You know that old riddle, "If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" I've got another: if they made a masterpiece and no one was there to see it, does it really exist? Such is the troubling, frustrating question surrounding Silence, or 2016's Most Criminally Underseen Hollywood Epic. I'm amazed that audiences didn't make a bigger deal outta this one, given that Scorsese has been desperate to make it since reading Shūsaku Endō's original novel in 1988. Scorsese Passion Projects are rare, but regardless whether they're great (The Last Temptation of Christ) or deeply flawed (Gangs of New York), they always merit your attention. Silence stands as both the strongest of the three and a natural companion piece to The Last Temptation of Christ. If The Last Temptation of Christ illustrates the psychic and emotional damage that results when you can't stop hearing the voice of God, Silence argues that it's equally traumatic if you can't hear Him at all. See, Jesuit Priest Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield, in the best performance he's ever given, Hacksaw Ridge be dammed) has a dangerous mission - spreading the gospel of Christ in Japan during a time (the seventeenth century) when the shogunate could literally put you to death for being a Christian - and all he really has bolstering his crusade is a deep, unyielding belief in God. Problem is, by Rodrigues' own admission, he's having trouble receiving guidance from the Lord, and this void leaves him adrift, especially the more he learns about the shogunate's treatment of Christians. Scorsese has always been the most Catholic of filmmakers, and like Charlie in Mean Streets or Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Rodrigues is desperate to find some meaning that justifies the world's atrocities. But whereas Charlie singed his fingers on a votive candle as a means of trying to exorcise his feelings of spiritual inadequacy and guilt, Rodrigues faces much higher stakes, particularly once the shogunate (represented by the comic-menacing pairing of Issey Ogata and Tadanobu Asano) arrests him and turns his faith into a moral conundrum: if Rodrigues doesn't renounce the word of God, then the government will torture more Japanese Catholics. These scenes make for incredibly harrowing viewing, both in terms of the on-screen violence (Silence isn't a bloodbath like The Departed, but Scorsese presents its brutality so matter-of-factly that the carnage takes on the horrible implacability of a nightmare) and Rodrigues' reaction to it. Scorsese and Garfield want our ambivalence towards the character - we're simultaneously pulling for him to keep the faith and frustrated when the compendium of horrors surrounding him (Christians scalded, drowned, crucified, held upside-down to bleed from cuts behind their ears, and - in one ghastly moment - beheaded) starts to outweigh his own struggle. Silence is not an easy sit, and despite its aesthetic beauty (DP Rodrigo Prieto merges humans and their environments in ways that would thrill Akira Kurosawa), Scorsese deliberately drags his heels in Rodrigues' struggle, forcing us to agonize with the same questions of belief as his protagonist. Some may not want to do that, and I get it. Whatever conventional thrills we expect from cinema, Silence ain't offering 'em. But those who are patient will be richly rewarded during Silence's climax, which stands alongside Jean-Pierre Melville's Leon Morin, Priest as one of the most wrenching examinations of religious strife that I have ever seen. This film is a masterwork.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "embodies cinema's most artful and its most purposeful sides. Far from the empty entertainment vessels around it, the film is a beacon of delicately paced, smartly constructed, and emotionally gripping moviemaking that sacrifices entertainment value and modern wizardry in favor of an honest exploration of faith facing its greatest challenge. The movie does not ask the audience to understand it, nor does it ask the audience to agree with it. It asks the audience experience it, to feel the inward turmoil and the outward terror and, at least, relate with the characters as they're forced to explore their faith well beyond the limits of human understanding or physical coercion. The film offers a genuinely complex depiction of living in faith and simultaneously living in fear, and as it reaches its climax that division becomes less distanced and takes on greater meaning beyond the individual and his purpose in spreading the message of his faith. Much of the film is the depiction of Rodrigues' steadfastness and the counter, the evolving moral dilemma of standing tall against the immutable stalwarts on the other side who don't so much refuse to understand his teachings, but to accept them not because of what they say, but rather what they represent to those who hear it. The story evolves into a trial between faith in God and obligation to fellow man, a moral quagmire balancing convictions of faith and the physical ramifications thereof."
And the hits just keep on coming, thanks to A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment's release of the wonderful 20th Century Women. Like Silence, director Mike Mills' semi-autobiographical picture got nowhere near the attention it deserved, although I almost find 20th Century Women's fate to be all the more curious. I get that people would find Silence a tough beat, brilliant as it is, but I see no reason why audiences didn't flock to this engaging dramedy. What Mills has been doing over the course of two movies is to document the particular idiosyncrasies of his parents. If 2010's Academy Award-winning Beginners took inspiration from Mills' long-closeted father, then 20th Century Women shifts its focus to his mother, here named Dorothea Fields (the great Annette Bening), who goes about parenting with a kind of hard-nosed abandon. Time and place are so important to Mills - for one, he saturates his film in the culture and look of 1979 (if not for the very modern actors, you might mistake this one for something Hal Ashby made in the 1970s) - and never more important than when contextualizing Dorothea's character: here we have a child of the 1930s now raising a teenager (Lucas Jade Zumann) in the 1970s, so she adopts this sunny pragmatism when weighing the flowering cultural shifts. I'd liken the experience to watching Katharine Hepburn discuss free love; she wants to expose her son to all the right music (the differences between Black Flag and the Talking Heads play an unexpectedly delightful role in the film) and the social permissiveness of the times (particularly in the form of her son's best friend/main crush Julie, played by Elle Fanning), but she does so with the hard-edged pep of a Howard Hawks heroine. Bening doesn't act that frequently anymore, but whenever she does, it's just a gem, and her performance here ranks among her very best. But everyone's great here, whether we're talking about Fanning, Greta Gerwig, or a scene-stealing Billy Crudup, and I credit their willingness/acceptance to sink into Mills' world. If you've seen Beginners or his underrated Thumbsucker, then you're already familiar with his unique brand of realism and whimsy, and his actors bring this sublime bemusement to their parts. The experience is not at all dissimilar from going through the scrapbook of someone you love deeply, and I'm sure Mills would have it no other way.
Also from Lionsgate comes Patriots Day. There are a lot of reasons to criticize reflexively director Peter Berg's kinetic docudrama. The "Too Soon" Crowd isn't necessarily wrong in claiming that three years isn't enough distance between and its subject - the 2013 Boston Bombing and subsequent manhunt of perpetrators Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (played in the film by Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze) - especially one that, by all accounts, sensationalizes the brutal Watertown showdown between the Tsarnaevs and the BPD to Paul Greengrass-level degrees. Furthermore, for all of Berg's claims towards documentary-style verisimilitude, he still manages to reverse-engineer the film into a star vehicle for his Deepwater Horizon and Lone Survivor leading man Mark Wahlberg, playing a salty Boston cop who just happens to be present at most of the film's significant events even though his sustained presence doesn't make much logical or geographical sense (I know he's supposed to be a composite of three or four different characters, but the move still feels like a cynical commercial choice). And yet I'd be hard-pressed to name a film from 2016 that was as consistently, enjoyably gripping as this one. I know - "enjoyable" is a tough word to apply to a violent procedural about a terrorist bombing, but the Paul Greengrass comparison is apt. Berg paces Patriots Day like a Bourne movie, expertly cutting back and forth between the different principles (including Wahlberg, the Tsarnaevs, Kevin Bacon's FBI agent, John Goodman's BP Commissioner, J.K. Simmons' hardass Watertown police sergeant, and - in the film's standout performance - Jimmy Yang's frightened, courageous Dun Meng, who the Tsarnaevs take hostage during Patriots Day's tensest sequence), and all while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross create all sorts of aural dread on the soundtrack. The cumulative effect works you into knots, and as a result you don't have time to focus on the stuff that doesn't work (the infrequent, sappy cutaways to Christopher O'Shea and Rachel Brosnahan's terrorist victims; the documentary coda at the very end) because you're too invested in the stuff that does (the sequence where Wahlberg ingeniously deduces how to track the Tsarnaevs through security footage, or even that Watertown shootout, which might be hyperbolic but is no less thrilling for it). And credit must also go to Wahlberg. He might be playing a fictional character, but he imbues his working Boston stiff with enough humor and personality that you could watch a movie about what he does the days before and after the bombing (the opening scene, where he has to bust two very stupid criminals, is a comedy gem). Patriots Day didn't get much of a shot in theaters - here's hoping people rediscover it on home media.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "All of this tends to beg the question as to what exactly Patriots Day's 'message' is supposed to be. Deepwater Horizon, the near simultaneous collaboration between Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, at least had the subtext of environmentalism propelling the plot, but what is Patriots Day trying to say? Terrorism is bad? The resiliency of the human spirit is indomitable? That's fine, but then why not just make a documentary? 'Boston Strong' resonates through Patriots Day in an unavoidable (and indeed commendable) way, but the addition of fictionalized characters, while understandable, to my mind detracts or at least deflects from the real life heroes of the incident, both victims and the police investigating the mayhem. In fact, for all of Patriots Day's picayune detailing of how everything unfolded, some viewers may find the purest emotion in the film comes at the end, when several real life participants (including many who are 'characters' in the film) provide brief interview segments documenting their experiences both on the day of the attack and afterward. Sometimes the truth is, if not stranger, more powerful than fiction."
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. If nothing else, I can say this: the film represents the best possible movie to come from the Harry Potter universe'sSilmarillion equivalent. On the page, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a fake textbook, the reportings of magizoologist (sigh…) Newt Scamander (actually Potter architect J.K. Rowling) on different magical creatures. The film, however, ports this reference guide into a high-speed adventure that starts when Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) loses several such creatures in 1920s-era New York and quickly spins off into a dark conspiracy pitting Muggles against those with inherent magical abilities. As a movie, it works. Director David Yates is old hat at these stories (he has directed every Harry Potter movie since 2007's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), and he gets energetic performances from the likes of Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, and Ezra Miller, as well as a terrific villain turn from Colin Farrell (playing the Harry Potter equivalent of Tommy Lee Jones's character in The Fugitive). You won't be bored while you're watching it, and I guess that's something. But Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them doesn't linger well in the mind, and I blame that quality on two things. For one, the balance of family-friendly adventure with simmering darkness doesn't quite work – one minute, we're watching Redmayne bumble around like a sweeter, skinnier Benny Hill, and the next, we're engaged in a semi-serious psychodrama between Farrell and Miller. More importantly, though? Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is so naked an attempt at building a new franchise that it made me reflexively resent future endings. We don't get an ending; instead, Yates and Co. offer an ellipsis promising all sorts of unnecessary links to the Harry Potter story we already know, some of which actively hamper the semi-story we're trying to enjoy. I won't spoil it (although may outlets have), but the ending does more harm than good, particularly in the way it cheapens Farrell's villain. I love so much of what Marvel is doing, but I resent – if only a little – the way it's inspired every studio to shoot for its own cinematic shared universe. Warner: Harry Potter is over. We need new stories or else we'll die.