"Silence" (2016) movie review

Two women for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration suggested that I should watch Silence (2016). So I did.

Vorgriffe

I put some "preapprehensions" on the record before I took the time to watch "Silence" this afternoon.

From what I have read or heard or fantasize about the movie, I expected that it would:

- be pretentious;

- distort the real history of the Japanese martyrs;

- emphasize classic Japanese Shinto-Buddhist spirituality;

- downplay the necessity of preaching Jesus as the Savior of all of God's children;

- justify apostasy as the highest form of love for God and neighbor--the greatest evil is death of the innocent, and therefore the greatest good is to save the innocent by repudiating the gospel;

- silently recommend that Christians should be silent in today's culture wars because preaching Jesus does more harm than good;

- cultivate indifferentism: if God is love, and loves all of His children whole-heartedly at all times and in all places, then why should missionaries go out to all the world?

"Can anything good come out of Scorsese?"

I'm not saying that I'm being fair to the movie. Obviously, a good man would WATCH it with an open mind before judging it. I am not a good man, but I would love to have a good conversation with these two women of faith, and so I am going to do my level best to set these prejudices aside and see what I can see in the movie itself. But it would be dishonest to pretend that I don't have prejudices. One of the morals of the story about tacit knowing is that we do make up our minds very rapidly, "in the blink of an eye," on very limited information.

I have never watched Mel Gibson's Apocalypto.

I would never have gone to see "The Passion of the Christ" if a good friend had not forced me to. We nearly had a fistfight talking about the movie afterward.

I avoided the Dan Brown books until students' questions forced me to slog through them.

I am avoiding most of the evangelical movies (e.g., God is not Dead, I & II).

OK. Done with the first part of it. I will try to pick up the movie some time this afternoon because you are my friends and because I love talking about things with you. Please forgive me my vorgriffe. That's life with me! :-O

Postgriffe (Hindsights)

I worked my way through the movie through the course of an afternoon. I took several breaks, especially a nap after the first 41 minutes. With 15 minutes to go, I got a peanut butter sandwich and some decaf. That helped.