by Robert Bouffard
Spoilers for Silence and The Grey below!
I love to engage with media that challenges my beliefs. It makes me think deeply when a film or television show presents themes or characters who are opposed to my worldview. I like to understand where other people are coming from. Understanding and engaging others’ viewpoints are essential to forming your own.
I’ve eventually come to this conclusion largely because I grew up in an atmosphere that discouraged this oppositional engagement. The suggested way of handling things was to shelter your mind and insist that you were right, which is counterproductive.
Nowadays, I get excited when I watch a movie and love it, only to realize it has an oppositional viewpoint to another movie I love. It just serves to materialize the sort of debate and cultivation of thought that I enjoy so much.
These instances show me that contrasting ideas can coexist and each thrive, which is the kind of world I strive for.
So join me as I examine two movies that send opposite messages, but that I still love just the same.
Liam Neeson just happened to be in two of my favorite movies to address a deep, spiritual, and personal longing from the last ten years. In The Grey, Neeson plays a sniper whose job it is to protect men working on an oil refinery from Alaskan timberwolves, and in Silence, he plays a 17th century Jesuit missionary to Japan who abandons his faith in favor of a life dedicated to keeping Christianity out of the country.
At face value, these movies have nothing in common (other than Neeson, of course). They’re different genres, eras, and subject matter. One is directed by a man whose resume includes the likes of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, and The Irishman, while the other is directed by the guy who made The A-Team.
But beneath the surface – my favorite part of any movie – they both engage heavily in a search for a meaningful spiritual existence. Silence takes a look at deep-seated spiritual and religious beliefs in a person and how they can drive every single thing that they do in life. Conversely, The Grey examines a complete abandonment of the metaphysical and instead focuses on natural beauty and deep-rooted interpersonal relationships being a person’s driving force.
Silence is a movie that has fascinated me ever since I first saw it. It raised questions that blew my mind in a way I wasn’t expecting.
The movie follows two Portuguese Jesuit priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver), as they attempt to find out what happened to their mentor, Father Ferreira (Neeson). On their trek through Japan, they encounter a group of Christians who have been worshipping in secret, just looking for a tangible sign that their faith and Christian loyalty has been worth it. Encountering priests does this for them, but it also causes some of them to be found out and to suffer for their faith. This is where the hardest-hitting line of the movie is delivered –
“Surely God heard their prayers as they died. But did He hear their screams?”
When all seems lost and you’re in your final moments, is there someone or something spiritual who is there to catch you?
Throughout the movie, Rodrigues constantly struggles with this question. He sees death and suffering almost every day by people who say they are suffering in the name of God, yet, he sees no sign that God is there.
Japanese officials promise mercy for Christians so long as they apostatize, or publicly renounce God. Rodrigues calls out to God over and over for any sort of direction regarding what to do in such a situation, but it isn’t until he’s faced with the choice himself that he finally hears God’s voice in the silence.
“I suffered beside you,” God says. “I was never silent.”
Right there is the film’s thesis, in a vastly oversimplified statement. Rodrigues is assured beyond any shred of doubt that God was with him, has always been with him, and will always be with him. In the most difficult circumstances a person could face, God was with him and He was with the people who cried and prayed to Him as they died. They took meaning from something completely spiritual and applied it to the natural world.
Meanwhile, The Grey takes a whole different approach to what spiritual silence in impossible situations can mean.
After a terrible storm causes a plane to crash in the freezing and blizzardous Alaskan wilderness, eight men must find a way to get to safety. It’s a situation that brings humans to their tipping point much like Silence. The exact circumstances are quite different, but lives are on the edge of a knife nonetheless.
As these men are picked off one by one by a pack of wolves that began hunting them almost as soon as the plane crashed, they naturally begin to ask existential questions: why did they survive? Was it ordained? Was it simply luck?
Other than one or two members of the group, none of them believe in God. They want to get back to their normal life with their loved ones. They’re driven by a desire to see them again, and not by a desire to answer whether or not they’re supposed to be dead. The plane crashed, they didn’t die, and now they have to find a way to survive.
Survival instinct kicks in for the dwindling group of men. Though, the instinct is slightly different than that of an animal. They know why their survival instinct is driving them. As Samwise Gamgee beautifully puts it in The Two Towers, it’s “that there’s some good in this world… and it’s worth fighting for.”
Five of the characters’ deaths don’t happen until we hear about something tangible and important in their lives. For two of them it’s their child, for one it’s a sister, for another it’s the stunning, natural Alaskan wilderness, and for Ottway (Neeson) it’s his wife and the men he bonded with as they were in a constant state of life and death.
This movie has some of the most moving scenes of the last decade, and they all are related to a character accepting the reason behind their life to be one of these physical things. Some of them want to believe in more, but they just can’t for whatever their reason may be. But that’s okay, they found something strong and powerful that gives them a reason to carry on.
The characters in both of these movies are faced with impossible circumstances. It’s only natural to want to hold onto something. The characters in Silence choose the metaphysical, while those in The Grey choose the physical.
It’s fascinating to look at and think about. I relate more to the characters in The Grey seeing natural beauty, but there have been many times in my life where I’ve held onto something more. And I’m sure throughout the rest of my life, I’ll be looking to both.
This is the beauty of engaging with disparate stories and themes. It forces you to look inward and decide exactly how you feel about what you’re taking in. If you engage sincerely, you just may end up more towards the middle than you were expecting to.