This lengthy, detailed and extraordinarily well-crafted film produced by HBO is a story of corruption and child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Essentially a long-form piece of high-tone investigative journalism, it’s also some kind of horror movie. The 'monsters’ in this movie are priests, mostly, and their accomplices, men and women inside their own culture who elected to remain silent in the face of betrayal.
Gibney does not settle for easy answers or a simple narrative
We hear intimate details of sex abuse cases. I write that not to caution viewers who may be reluctant to view this movie on the basis that to even enter this seemingly well-known story in this form would seem to risk being made subject to 'bad taste’. But I want to be plain: this is a serious film, one with a powerful guiding intelligence that seeks to give this story humanity as well as excavate its subtle and complex politics. Which is to say that I think director Alex Gibney has included such graphic material as a way of honoring those who suffered. In a story like this – a story of power and influence, cover-up and backroom bureaucratic intrigue – its true subject, its victims, have a way of getting lost amongst the surge of outrage that seeks to bring its villains to justice. That’s one of Gibney’s major themes here.
The film’s historical reach and its canvas are ultimately wide and deep. We see the way the Vatican has understood this 'problem’ as one that has a 1,000-year history in the church; we hear how they have attempted to 'clean’ house by using everything from psychiatry to establishing special case missions and trouble-shooter priests. Gibney’s access is impressive; there are lawyers, priests, and victims here, all testifying to the vastness of the crime and the power of the church to, in some ways, 'beat’ the rap. No one from the Vatican agreed to appear on camera.
Gibney begins with a case study set in the US in the Midwest in the 1950s. Father Murphy, a cheerful looking cherub faced man, ran a school for the deaf in Wisconsin. He was well liked and a brilliant fundraiser. He endeared himself to children and parents and the wider community because he was a hearing man who could use sign language with great skill. Murphy spent decades exploiting the children under his care; he used them to gratify his sex drive. This wasn’t much of a secret amongst the boys, nor the other adults involved, according to witness testimony used here. Murphy would enlist older boys to 'turn’ the younger lads.
This story is told on camera in interviews with some men who were abused by Murphy: Arthur Budzinski, Terry Kohut, and Gary Smith. They use American Sign Language (ASL) to explain what happened to them and their pals, and their words are spoken by actors including John Slattery, Ethan Hawke and Chris Cooper.
In real world terms, Murphy escaped all prosecution; he would die a priest, a valued member of the church. As to the victims, they were humiliated, their claims ignored, or debased, and ridiculed.
Gibney is not out to make the obvious point that what happened at St. John’s School for the Deaf over several decades – and its enraging aftermath – is in someway an isolated incident in the Roman Catholic Church in the US, or indeed universally.
Instead, what drives Silence is a sensibility that is far more delicate and substantial than the desire, no matter how virtuous, of wanting to see hidden crimes exposed and their perpetrators brought to justice. Or to put it another way, Gibney does not settle for easy answers or a simple narrative. He’s out to investigate what he clearly understands as a unique and sinister culture that exists within the church. He’s out to explore its pathology: what makes it live? How does it survive?
As one expert witness puts it here, part of the answer is the church’s method of assessing and managing accusations of crimes: 'Deny, minimise, and blame."
There’s a sense that the film’s revelations inspire a certain helplessness; the outgoing Pope features here. At one point he was the Vatican’s 'go-to guy’ for sex abuse cases. He saw every accusation. And there followed more silence.
Gibney narrates the film in a moderate voice that only seems to enhance the sense of horror around the subject; he also wrote the script. But as with his excellent Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, his work builds on the research and investigative skills of journalists. Here it is New York Times religious columnist Laurie Goodstein. She’s an expert on the issues and wrote about the Murphy case and appears on camera here. And like so many who challenge church authority, Goodstein was accused of bigotry (and in turn was subject to racial smears herself).
I began by saying that Silence is 'journalism’, but it's also cinema. Gibney brings forth an arsenal of technique to press his case. There is a big music score that weeps in sympathy, a plethora of archival footage, including some heart-stopping home movies of Murphy and the boys and some stylised sequences that stand-in for the emotional memories of victims. Shot using lenses that distort and exaggerate space and figures, we see nothing explicit – the lasting impression is of creeping silhouettes; over-sized men who stand-over tiny children. These passages are like watching some corrupted interpretation of bedtime spook stories of boogey men and dark shadows. It’s a brilliant, poetic way to express innocence lost. It's frightening because it's real.
