, a novel by the late Japanese author Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) who also wrote the screenplay for the 1971 Japanese film Chinmoku (Silence). Endo was a Christian and Silence tracks the struggles of a Portugese Jesuit called to Japan during a season of severe persecution designed to obliterate Christianity. Jay Cocks (who wrote the screenplay for Scorsese's Gangs of New York) is the screenwriter, and production is due to begin in the summer of 2007.What drew Scorsese to this project, and what will he do with the material? Worthwhile questions, considering that this was the director behind the camera for the 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, and the director who turned the murderer in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear into a Pentecostal Christian (in reaction--some say--to the way Christians attacked his Last Temptation film).
What will the acclaimed director focus on from Endo's novel? What concerns me is what will be done with the priest's spiritual struggles and with the challenges from his tormentors. The priest in the novel often asks himself about the silence of God in the face of such intense suffering on the part of faithful Christians. And the tormentors often remind the priest that the Japanese have their own religion (Buddhism) and the Christian faith he is trying to transplant in that foreign soil will never survive. The Japanese officials, in fact, consider Christianity just one more Western characteristic they are trying to expel from their islands.
Could it be that it's this theme that has captured the attention of the director and screenwriter: the conviction that Christianity is part of "Western culture" that shouldn't be imposed on other cultures? Never mind that it's this conviction that led 17th century Japanese magistrates to devise the most inhuman of tortures for their own Japanese citizens who embraced Christianity.
Will the magistrates become "the voice of reason" in this film adaptation of the novel? Will the film convey the futility of missionaries like this priest who bring Christianity to other cultures only to bring trouble to the people who embrace it? It would certainly fit the spirit of the age: to many, Christianity is looked upon as a "Western religion"--even an "American religion"--that shouldn't be transplanted to other cultures. In reality, Christianity is a universal faith that transcends passports, flags, and national customs. Far from being "Western" or "American," culturally-speaking, Christianity actually sprang from a Jewish messianic movement in first-century Jersusalem under Roman occupation. It spread from there south, east, west, and--for our interests in America--it also spread north into what is now Europe and the British isles to take root in Anglo-Saxon soil and from there made its way to America. In other words, cultures now considered "Western" and specifically "American" were recipients of missionary outreach long, long before they became supporters of missionary outreach.
So, I'm waiting to see how Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese deal with this theme in Endo's novel. It would be ironic if the film looked sympathetically upon the novel's characters who justify their inhumane torture of Japanese Christians on the premise that a "Western" religion had no place in Japanese culture.
Hat Tip to Jeffrey Overstreet, who announced the upcoming film adaptation of Endo's novel in his review of Scorsese's current film, The Departed. Overstreet wrote:
Shazuko Endo’s Silence . . . gives Scorsese the richest, most profound source material he's ever had to work with. Let's hope that he finds himself more inspired by the passion of the missionary than by the malevolence of the devils who try to discourage him.
