It is a shame on two levels that Martin Scorsese’s Silence, the director’s long-gestating epic about missionaries in 17th-century Japan, did not earn a Best Picture or Best Director Oscar nomination. First, because it deserved one. Second, because it would have brought Scorsese and Mel Gibson together, since the latter, in a coup for his comeback, won Picture and Director nominations for the World War II movie Hacksaw Ridge . . . whose star, Andrew Garfield, is also the star of Silence, playing in both cases men of Christian zeal.
Gibson and Scorsese are not often considered as a diptych, but they should be, and not only because both are great entertainers who are bloody-minded in their own distinctive ways. They also have a kind of theological kinship, occupying two poles of Catholic artistry in an age of Catholic civil war — Scorsese the anguished liberal, heterodox and doubting yet unable to escape the Church’s hold on his imagination; Gibson the mad traditionalist, painting a medieval religious vision on the canvas of late-modern cinema.
Comments