Go to Confession in a theater.
Confession is a Stalin-era interrogation drama that was written by Ben Shapiro and directed by Václav Marhoul, the Czech filmmaker behind 2019's The Painted Bird. The cast includes Rob Lowe, James Franco, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Nick Nolte, Emile Hirsch, Dean Norris, Richard Brake, and Brad Dourif. Set in Moscow in 1938, the film stars Lowe as Alexei, a Russian literature professor who is dragged into Lubyanka Prison and accused of conspiring with his priest.
Everyone should go see Confession when it plays in theaters November 11. Conservatives have been complaining about Hollywood for decades. Shapiro and the Daily Wire may have actually given us a great movie.
I saw the trailer for Confession while we had just wrapped up the Anti-Communist Film Festival and was attending the annual Film Noir Festival at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theatre. Confession, at least judging by the trailer, combines anti-communism and film noir.
Confession director Václav Marhoul is also the director of Smart Phillip, a film based on the character Phillip Marlowe, the private eye protagonist in the crime novels written by Raymond Chandler. Marlowe was featured on screen in such film noir classics as The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye and Murder My Sweet. If Confession looks like film noir — with its odd camera angles, innocent protagonist thrown into a situation he knows little about, and crime plot — that’s because Marhoul knows the material very well.
At the recent FilmNoir Festival at the American Film Institute, I got a chance to talk to Foster Hirsch, the film historian and author of several books about Hollywood, most recently Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher — Television. Hirsch defended the 1950s. “One of the reasons I wrote Movies of the Fifties is to challenge the idea that the 50s were this bland conformist period where there was no difference of opinion and everybody was content. It was a much more complicated and divided period than that. People talk about the bland Eisenhower years, but Eisenhower was much more clever than he’s given credit for.”
Hirsch agrees with me that many of the anti-communist films of the 1950s have been unfairly criticized; one of my favorites, My Son John, has been savaged for years by liberal critics. “I think My Son John is a terrific movie,” he says. I don’t care what your political beliefs are, you should be open to seeing it.” I offer that I Married a Communist is not a bad movie. “Not at all,” Hirsch agrees.” Even if your politics are completely opposed to those of the film and have your one opinion about things, you should be open to seeing it. See it, form an opinion, make up your own mind.”
“Artistic quality cannot be measured solely in terms of how any single film satisfies or disappoints politically engaged viewers,” Hirsch writes in Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties. He calls My Son John, “an overwrought piece of Christian propaganda infused with uber-patriotic paranoia” but also “a unique period piece that expresses with deeper conviction than any other anticommunist film of the time the fear and loathing with which communism was widely regarded.” As our current political environment shows, those fears were well-founded.
I’ll be going to Confession November 11.