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The Japanese writer Shusaku Endo’s interest in the silence of God led him to provide his 1969 novel on the subject with the mere title, Silence.

The time is the 1600s.  Two Catholic priests from Portugal sail to Japan to spiritually aid the Christians there and to find out why a fellow priest called Father Ferreira apparently apostatized.  The shocking torture of Christians both Japanese and European has routinely occurred in Japan (at the hands of Japanese authorities) any time a believer has refused to trample on the engraved image of Jesus called the fumie.  The novel’s hero, Father Rodrigues, is a godly man, but he is bothered by God’s silence in the face of the suffering he beholds–and he perforce confronts the possibility of becoming a “fallen priest” in such a treacherous land.

Is there a form of Christian “fallenness” that is justified, at least when faith remains in the heart?

Clumsy prose prevails in Silence (“Banging his head against the wall he kept murmuring monotonously:  “It cannot be so . . .”), but the novel is sobering.  I must ask, however:  Are persecuted born-again Catholic priests really concerned about the silence–or “silence”– of God?  Perhaps it depends on the nature of the persecution.  Much of the novel’s meaning, in any case, is rather questionable.  It is not as fine an accomplishment as the novels of Mauriac and Bernanos, who, like the late Endo, were devout Catholics.  But it is assuredly religious and hardly uninteresting.   

Cover of Clockstoppers

Clockstoppers (2002), directed by Jonathan Frakes, is about adolescents who are empowered by science for moving in hypertime, namely, so fast that everything around them appears as though it were in suspended animation.  A stimulating pop piece for a while, the film delivers a narrative about domestic terrorists that is sheer rubbish.  When we don’t see this narrative, we witness the film singing the praises of teen mischief (mischief in hypertime).  Clockstoppers is worthless.  The movie stars Jesse Bradford and Paula Garces, both undistinguished.  Miss Garces often displays her navel and in one scene wears nothing but a towel but–sorry, Paramount Pictures–because she is just a kid there is no sexiness here. 

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To me Fast Five (2011), the latest fast-and-furious item, is fairly enjoyable.  But only fairly.  Its best action sequence comes way too early; it’s superior to the final action sequence.  It involves a train targeted by Dominic Toretto (a smug Vin Diesel) and several other criminals, and it’s explosive fun.

Nevertheless, why should the details of the movie’s plot be so crazily childish, as when Toretto’s relatives spring him from captivity by savagely wrecking a prison bus?  Or when Toretto manages to free himself from chains while suspended from a ceiling?  Or when a bikini-clad babe is able to get Mr. Gangster’s handprint on her clothes in order to–oh, never mind.  It’s too silly to go into.  The Westerns I read make a heckuva lot more sense than this thing.

Oh, well.  I still had a good time at Fast Five.  Director Justin Lin is talented at filming car chases, etc.  FF‘s women are comely, and there are interesting shots of Rio, where the action takes place.  Too bad the criminals and a couple of honorable police officers destroy the poor city.   

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I’m not buying the premise of The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), all about a rich boy who, for some reason, beats prostitutes to a pulp.  It’s a ho-hum legal thriller.

Marisa Tomei, Josh Lucas, Frances Fisher, Bryan Cranston and even Matthew McConaughey should all be put to better histrionic use.

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The Barbarian Invasions (2003), by Denys Arcand, offers a few characters from Arcand’s 1987 film, The Decline of the American Empire.  The ’03 product could almost suitably be called The Decline of the Canadian Nation, but first things first.

Remy (Remy Girard), a middle-aged history professor and staunch leftist, has long loved women and good wine but is now dying of an unspecified illness.  His wife (Dorothea Berryman), who spurned Remy long ago for his philandering, is now at his side, and so is his estranged son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau), a “capitalist” (says Remy) who assesses risk for a London investment bank.  Realizing what lousy care his father is receiving from the state-supported Quebec hospital he is in, wealthy Sebastien resolves to better the ailing sensualist’s last days by purchasing favors and privileges.  To begin with, he acquires for him a private hospital room and also contacts Remy’s old friends to request a courtesy visit.  After heroin is recommended as a painkiller for Dad, Sebastien seeks to buy some, and his instrument for this is pretty Nathalie (Marie-Josee Croze), a junkie who is the daughter of one of Remy’s ex-mistresses.  Nathalie, incidentally, falls in love with Sebastien even though the latter has a fiancee–Gaelle (Marina Hands).

One of the “barbarian invasions” of the film’s perfect title is indeed that of the inflow of  illegal drugs–Canadian police can’t stop it–but we learn before long that it also refers to what al-Qaeda did on 9/11.  Could it not be true as well that the sensualism of the sexual liberationist era is a barbarian invasion?  Arcand, with his focus on Remy, prompts us to wonder.  And where there is sexual liberation there is leftism–in a Western democracy, anyway.  Invasions is one of the very few fiction films I know that distrusts, however quietly, liberal ideas and tendencies.   

Canada’s socialized medicine comes in for a beating, and the warm attitude Remy once had toward Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution he now considers utter “cretinism.”  Although the former prof can’t help seeing the non-intellectual Sebastien, who prefers video games to reading, as representing a kind of barbarian invasion, he himself abjectly fears he has lived a life without meaning, one of wasted effort.  But does a liberal-minded, secular society, the film asks, produce wasted effort too?

Secular?  Yes.  A Catholic priest tells Gaelle there was a precise moment in 1966 that the people in his parish stopped attending church, never to return.  Remy travels to Burlington, Vermont for medical tests and when a pert hospital employee welcomes him and Sebastien to the U.S.A., the twosome sarcastically reply, “Praise the Lord” and “Hallelujah.”  What we have here are French Canadians mocking what they know to be a potent force in America–religion–when they must visit this particular country for superior medical service.  Arcand is concentrating on the profound secularism so cherished by the Left and so incapable of arresting . . . the decline of the Canadian nation.

There is a problem with The Barbarian Invasions in that none of its people is a truly respectable or honorable human being, although Sebastien’s nascent love for his father is something to be esteemed.  The film’s sophistication goes only so far, but at least it’s there.  It’s an intelligent comedy-drama, remarkably successful at blending domestic content with social criticism. . . Arcand’s actors do everything right, with plenty of quiet power emanating from Rousseau and Croze.  In fact, quiet power is all over this film.

The Barbarian Invasions is in French with English subtitles.

(Photo above of Marie-Josee Croze.)