Martin Scorsese's ambition to render Shusako Endo's masterpiece Silence on film is back in the news. The great director is reportedly wooing the great actor Daniel Day Lewis for the film. We like that just fine.
Meanwhile, we urge gentle readers to dip into yet another of Endo's works, The Samurai, the latest addition to the SWNID Fiction Club. The story of a low-level Japanese nobleman of the early seventeenth century who journeys across two oceans and back again amongst Europeans, it presents yet another haunting, compelling image of Christ and discipleship.
If it's a choice between reading Endo and reading The Shack, we firmly recommend Endo.
2 comments:
MArty is probably my favorite director, and Silence very close to my favorite novel if not the favorite, so I was very hopeful for all of this. Not to mention DDL who has feautred in some of the best films of the last thirty years: My Left Foot, Gangs of New York and In the Name of the Father.
Yet, I recently read an interview with MS in which revealed the extent to which he misunderstood Silence. BAsically, he thinks it's all about why missions and evangelism are stupid—they cannot actually work. Poor Marty, great behind a camera, poor behind a book. I still await eagerly to see if Endo's great narrative will overcome the director's ignorance, but now I'm nervous.
Silence produced on the hackneyed notion that proselytizing is evil would be a bitter disappointment, not least because the novel isn't remotely about proselytizing. It's about martyrdom, until it turns to become about something else. The Samurai is about proselytizing.
But we doubt that Maestro Marty is so silly as all that. at least we hope he isn't. So we wonder whether he's talking this way for the industry and the money men, as in, "Be calm, financiers! I am not Mel Gibson. This movie will expose how awful Christian missionaries are. Don't worry about soiling yourselves with a 'Christian' project."
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