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Although “Confessions” is based on an original screenplay by Ben Shapiro — the arch-conservative writer whose Daily Wire media company is distributing the film, and whose very name in the credits will prime some critics
to expect the worst from the get-go — it plays like an adaptation of a stage play that no one involved considered opening up for the screen. Indeed, Czech director Václav Marhoul (“The Painted Bird”) provides a fade to black between most sequences, suggesting prime spots for intermissions.
Unfortunately, that’s just part of the reason why “Confessions” feels so talky and sluggish. Lead actors Rob Lowe and James Franco do a credible and creditable job of inhabiting their characters, and somehow manage to strike potent emotional sparks with even the more stilted dialogue. (“Evil and good are luxuries the Revolution can no longer afford!”) But that’s not quite enough to keep viewers from being inordinately aware of the passing of time and the stasis of the storytelling.
Marhoul and Shapiro begin their ponderous passion play about the brutalities of life in Stalinist Russia by panning around the seedy apartment of Alexi (Lowe), a gone-to-seed former professor of literature who’s now employed in a dead-end job at the Ministry of Transport. Is he happy with his lot? Apparently not: The first time we get a good look at Alexi, he is licking up vodka he accidentally spilled on the floor. Obviously, what this fellow needs is a shot at redemption. What he gets, unfortunately, is a forced escort to Moscow’s hellish Lubyanka Prison, where he is accused of being in counterrevolutionary cahoots with a dissident Eastern Orthodox priest who has published pamphlets critical of the Soviet system.
Alexi’s interrogator just happens to be one of his former students, Vladimir (Franco), who initially seems to enjoy talking about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and other icons of Russian literature with his former mentor. His smile declines only slightly as Alexi resists his cajolery, veiled threats and not-so-veiled threats while, ahem, encouraging the ex-academic to sign a confession of his role in penning the priest’s pamphlets.
Even when Vladimir offers to reunite Alexi with his former wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who practically shoves a pen in his hand to sign the paper, and his estranged adult son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a rising star in the Soviet bureaucracy, Alexi remains resolute. So, inevitably, the gloves come off in the interrogation room.
To give “Confession” fair credit, it has, despite the overall predictability of its plot, a few tricks up its sleeve. It turns out that it’s not a coincidence, or a screenwriter’s contrivance, that Vladimir is the one given the task of interrogating Alexi. There is a shared history between the two men, but a key chapter is revealed by one to the other only late in the story.
Here and there, the film hints that Alexi feels he deserves to be punished for his sins — perhaps not this harshly, but punished nonetheless, to solidify his newly forged attachment to Jesus Christ. All of which leads to an ambiguous conclusion that might cue lively discussion among folks who stick around for the final minutes.
But for too many stretches, “Confessions” is tough going, and not just because of the brutality inflicted on Alexi. There is a second-hand quality to more than a few plot elements; for example, a scene in which Alexi and his wife meet in the interrogation room echoes a strikingly similar scene with Alan Bates and Carol White in John Frankenheimer’s 1968 film of Bernard Malamud’s “The Fixer.” (Which, come to think of it, was another movie about an innocent tormented by the authorities in Mother Russia.) At another point, when a fellow prisoner played (or, to be more precise, growled) by Nick Nolte describes the horrors he witnessed during the 1930s man-made famine in Ukraine, it is all too obviously a Big Moment that is meant to score points. It is a showstopper, in search of a show to stop.
