SCORSESE AND THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Critics and commentators tended to see Silence (2016) as a kind of culmination of the themes of redemption, faith, and violence that have pervaded Martin Scorsese's films over several decades. In an article on “The Passion of Martin Scorsese” in The New York Times Magazine that preceded the release of the film, Paul Elie writes, “In his new film, ‘Silence,’ Martin Scorsese returns to a subject that has animated his entire life's work and that also sparked his career's greatest controversy: the nature of faith.” Scorsese said so himself. He told Elie, “I don't know if there's redemption, but there is such a thing as trying to get it right. But how do you do it? The right way to live has to do with selflessness. I believe that. But how does one act that out? I don't think you practice it consciously. It has to be something that develops in you—maybe through a lot of mistakes.”

In her review of Silence, Manohla Dargis, also in The New York Times, similarly notes thematic continuity in Scorsese's filmography. She says that “Mr. Scorsese's work has long involved struggles of faith of one kind or another,” including early films such as Mean Streets (1973) to the more recent The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Dargis writes, “Martin Scorsese's ‘Silence’ is a story of faith and anguish. It tells of a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Rodrigues, who in 1643 heads into the dark of Japan, where Christians are being persecuted—boiled alive, immolated and crucified. Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) sets out to help keep the church alive in Japan, a mission that perhaps inevitably leads to God.” Other Scorsese films that have been seen as stories of faith, redemption, and religious conflict often include Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Cape Fear (1991), Kundun (1997), and George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011).

To film critics, The Age of Innocence (1993) not only did not seem to belong on any such list of Scorsese films of faith and redemption, it did not even seem like a Scorsese film.