CHRISTIAN TOTO: Confession: Ben Shapiro Delivers Powerful Anti-Communist Warning.
That faith-based label cuts both ways.
The phrase was initially fine for reaching Christian consumers. It later suggested small budgets, weak acting and stories that preached to the theatrical choir.
The genre has grown in recent years, expanding to horror (“Nefarious“), comedy (“The Best Christmas Pageant Ever“) and, now, anti-communist dramas.
“Confession,” written by Ben Shapiro, follows a broken professor hauled before Soviet officials to “out” an ex-colleague. It’s brainy and raw, making the most of its limited setting to tell a grim tale of faith and endurance.
Rob Lowe stars as Alexei, a former literature professor arrested by Soviet goons without explanation. He’s brought before Vladimir (James Franco), a government toady who once studied under the professor.
Vladimir insists Alexei squeal on a holy man who allegedly distributed anti-Communist pamphlets. Alexei refuses, telling his former student that he knows nothing about the pamphlets or the priest.
Vee haf wayz of making you tawk, of course, especially for guests at the infamous Lubyanka Prison circa 1938.
Vladimir and Alexei have a shared history and mutual respect, but Vladimir will show his old professor no mercy if he doesn’t do as told.
At The Free Press, Rod Dreher adds: Confession Is a Masterpiece.
How does a man follow Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s directive to “live not by lies” when a lie could save his life? Once he has soiled his soul with lies, can it ever be made clean? And the most difficult question of all, the one at the heart of Ben Shapiro’s extraordinary new film and screenwriting debut, Confession: In a world without God, why suffer for the truth if a lie can free you and your loved ones from tormentors too powerful to defeat physically?
These are Dostoyevskian questions, posed in a psychologically intense drama set inside Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1938, at the height of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. Rob Lowe (of all actors!) plays Alexei Abramov, a drunk and dissolute literature professor dragged into Lubyanka for interrogation by the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. Though Fyodor Dostoyevsky died in 1881, we are in the world the great novelist foresaw with nightmare clarity, the one Solzhenitsyn faced down in the 20th century with so much courage, and that Confession conjures for the 21st, which needs the reminder. Adding to the complexity of Abramov’s brutal interrogation is the fact he knows his interrogator, Vladimir (played by James Franco with the eyes and delivery of a spitting cobra). Vladimir was once Alexei’s most brilliant student. Lowe, a Hollywood heartthrob of yore, whose battered, handsome face conveys the psychological and spiritual downfall of his character, finds himself under the boot—at times literally—of his former protégé, who found life as a Bolshevik secret policeman more fulfilling than the scholarly path.
The dramatic setup is simple: The secret police are trying to build a case against an Orthodox priest they suspect of committing the crime of evangelism. They know that Abramov is acquainted with the priest, Father Nikolai, hence his interrogation. The Soviet prison suggests a dark, hopeless, unremittingly grimy anteroom to hell—which is what the Lubyanka was in those days. The jailers toss the professor into a dank, tiny cell not much bigger than a coffin.
The coolly sadistic Vladimir tries to goad his old professor into making a confession, a statement that will give the NKVD the grounds to arrest the priest. But Stalin’s secret police never needed a legal warrant to take anybody into custody and put a bullet in their brains. We soon see that the demand for a “confession” is a psychological scalpel slicing through Abramov’s spiritual scar tissue, to reveal a cancer eating at his own soul.
It gives nothing away to say that Abramov is no innocent. He might not be guilty of association with the priest, a counterrevolutionary believer in Christ, but he has informed on his academic rivals to get ahead. Is this why the once-respected scholar has become a wretched drunk? And for that matter, how did a promising literature student, Vladimir, who studied all the Russian greats with Abramov, turn into a sadist who delights in tormenting his former master?
Naturally of course, a reviewer at leftist industry house organ The Hollywood Reporter is obligated to trash the movie: Confession Review: Rob Lowe and James Franco in a Ben Shapiro-Scripted, Stalinist Russia-Set Drama That’s Terminally Tedious.
Confession is an all too painful reminder that every time Hollywood makes one of its periodic anti-blacklist movies, ultimately, that’s the system of government they’re defending. And simultaneously, a warning that any actor who risks working with non-approved studios committing doubleplus ungood wrongthink risks get blacklisted himself, which is why the son of Danny Trejo, the veteran tough guy actor who starred in 2010’s Machete, issued a groveling apology to the industry earlier this year after dad appearing in one of Shapiro’s movies: Danny Trejo Had ‘Never Heard’ of Ben Shapiro Before Signing On for Daily Wire’s Pawn Shop, Says His Son: ‘It’s F—ed Up. He’s Handcuffed to This Stupid Project.’
