About halfway through my training as a Jesuit priest, I spent three years working as a high school English teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Late in the 19th century, Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota people had invited the Jesuits to come to Pine Ridge to begin a school, which took his name, and we’ve been there ever since. Working on the Pine Ridge, I witnessed the struggle in missionary work between the impulse to judge success strictly in terms of levels of conversion to Christianity and a consideration for the varied and often surprising ways the Spirit works in a community. The best religious on the Pine Ridge strove for a middle ground, representing authentically their own experience of God while also being open to and respectful of the ways the Spirit was working in the Lakota people. But some tried to lose themselves in the people (a ready temptation, given the richly spiritual character of Lakota culture); others at times condemned our work for not looking more like their image of church. “Silence,” Martin Scorsese’s new film about 17th-century Jesuit missionaries to Japan, offers a meditation on these different missionary impulses and struggles. Andrew Garfield (“The Amazing Spider-Man”) plays Portuguese Jesuit Sebastião Rodrigues, an earnest young priest who travels to Japan with fellow Jesuit Father Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver, “The Force Awakens”) in search of their mentor, Father Cristóvão Ferreira (the fantastic Liam Neeson, “Taken”), who has supposedly renounced the faith and joined Japanese culture. Japan at the time is deep in its persecution of Christianity; those who continue to worship do so at great peril of being discovered and martyred by Japanese Inquisitor Inoue (played with riveting and unexpected wit by Issey Ogata). The Catholic priesthood itself has been all but wiped out. Rodrigues and Garrpe are forced to spend most of their time in hiding, before being separated for good. The film follows the journey of Garfield’s Rodrigues as his idealistic faith is tested. In the abstract, that sounds like an interesting story. And the 1966 novel of the same name, on which the film is based, written by the great Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō, is a profound meditation on the apparent silence of God in the face of our struggles. But on screen, while gorgeously shot, “Silence” proves to be a dry, arduous tangle. Garfield, who has told the media about his own positive experiences with the Jesuits — in preparation for the film he went through a form of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which are the foundation of Jesuit spirituality — seems so eager to portray the Jesuits positively that he loses track of any sense of realism. His acting, and to some extent the film’s script, fall into the trap of so many portrayals of religious figures, offering a character that is all ideas and church-speak and no flesh. Garfield’s Rodrigues comes off as a bore who too often interprets the experiences of other people as reflections of his own reliving of the life of Christ. Scorsese tries to have his spiritual cake and eat it too. He spends half the film presenting Garfield’s Rodrigues as a hero, though it’s difficult to admire a character who displays such messianic narcissism. Of one character who betrays him he says, “Judas was only paid 30 pieces of silver.” But in fact “Silence” works best when it’s not about Rodrigues at all. The portrayals of worship and sacrifice of ordinary Japanese Christians are deeply moving. As the apostate priest, Neeson offers a rich and subtle performance that also has the ring of truth. Here, finally, is a priest-character you could talk to about your worst mistakes, or those of the White Sox front office. Meanwhile, the audience has no reason to believe that Garfield’s Rodrigues would have much helpful to say about either. At the very end of the film, Rodrigues makes one truly profound statement about the silence of God. For me, it highlighted that somewhere within this ponderous narrative there was a meaty story to be told about the struggle to carry on when God seems absent, and what God’s silence means. The idea that Scorsese — one of our greatest directors — wanted to consider such questions in a major motion picture is thrilling. However violent his films can be, most of them wrestle with deep spiritual questions. But in the case of “Silence,” the wrestling regrettably comes to nothing. McDermott is a Jesuit priest from Mount Prospect working as a screen and magazine writer in Los Angeles.