PULP & POPCORN

Page 59
The performances are all solid, but there are definitely standouts. Kichijiro
(Yosuke Kubozuka) helps get Rodrigues and Garrpe to Japan in the first place, but he
is a moral disaster, a weak man who tries to be strong, always folding under the
slightest threat. Over and over, we watch Kichijiro fail those around him, and
Rodrigues in particular seems to get saddled with Kichijiro as an ongoing irritant. I
can’t think of a greater test of a priest’s ability to live his own message than the way
Kichijiro keeps coming to Rodrigues for forgiveness, knowing full well that he will
betray the priest and fail him again in the future. Of course he will. That’s who he is,
and God’s forgiveness of that is an essential part of understanding what it is that
people see in religion. For Kichijiro, none of his culture’s faiths help him understand
or accept his own nature. In Christianity, though, he is presumed weak and flawed
from the start, and he is offered forgiveness without end as long as he repents. He
craves a salvation he knows he does not deserve, and the fact that he doesn’t deserve
it is the point. That’s why Christ suffered. He knew how weak we were, and someone
had to take on that pain. Someone had to accept it.
Likewise, Shinya Tsukamoto as Mokichi stands as another marker on the
moral journey that Rodrigues is taking, and his portrayal of what devout faith really
looks like is both beautiful and almost crushing. Unlike Rodrigues, who has come
into this culture and who can never truly understand what it’s like to be both
Japanese and Christian, it is clear that Mokichi knows full well what that
contradiction means, and he is willing to pay any price for what he believes is his own
salvation. His faith is unflappable, and it is a haunting performance.
Two more significant figures come into play later in the film, and both of them
deserve the highest possible praise. Tadanobu Asano is introduced as The
Interpreter, but there is far more to him than just a simple translator. He is gifted,
razor-sharp, and he has an almost surgical way of dissecting a believer verbally
without having to touch them physically. He works hand in hand with Inquisitor
Inouye, and Issei Ogata is flat-out awesome in that role. I feel as excited about his
work as I did the first time I saw Inglorious Basterds and saw Christoph Waltz’s Hans
Landa. The difference is that Quentin Tarantino gave Hans Landa enough screen
time to feel like a genuinely important part of the film while the Japanese characters
here are given far shorter shrift than the white priests.