Ben Shapiro’s Screenwriting Debut Is Here. It Stars a Surprising Number of Recognizable Names.

Movies Confession stars a surprising number of recognizable names. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Rebecca Onion? Nov 11, 20265:45 AM The Daily Wire Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The funniest thing about the Daily Wire’s grim Islamophobic fantasy Run Hide Fight: Infidels, which premiered on the website’s streaming service earlier this fall, was that the character played by the disgraced Jonathan Majors, the sole big name in the cast, was absent throughout most of the movie, leaving a cast of unknown zoomer actors to try—and mostly fail—to keep the viewer’s attention. It was another bleak entry in the ongoing foray of the Daily Wire and producer Ben Shapiro into feature filmmaking. But the conservative media company’s new movie, Confession, now streaming on the Daily Wire’s website, does not have this problem. The list of stars who signed on for this is long, and they’re not all #MeToo’d actors thirsting for the spotlight, either. Surprisingly, Confession actually feels passably like a real movie—if not one I could recommend most people see. Here’s who agreed to be in the first feature film written by Shapiro, about a professor brought to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1938 for interrogation by agents of the Stalinist state: Rob Lowe, who plays the professor, Alexei, a broken-down, shivering alcoholic with yellow teeth and a face full of spider veins; James Franco, who plays his main interrogator, Alexei’s former student Vladimir, a once promising young man turned into a vicious instrument of state violence; Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alexei’s ex-wife Anya, brought in to put pressure on Alexei to betray the priest the state seeks to imprison for distributing religious pamphlets. Brad Dourif plays the priest, and Nick Nolte an unnamed Jewish inmate, one of three sharing a cell with Alexei, a person besieged by guilt who participated in the brutal process of dekulakization—a campaign that aimed to “liquidate” wealthy peasant farmers—in Ukraine. Even the smaller roles with less airtime in this movie have recognizable names filling them: the Oscar-nominated Kodi Smit-McPhee as Alexei’s estranged son, and Emile Hirsch as a concert pianist whose fame hasn’t kept him from incarceration. You might be wondering: Why did all these real actors say yes when the Daily Wire came knocking? Because Confession was wrapped in just a few months, filmed in a studio in Los Angeles, and, apparently, let you choose whether or not your character would speak English with a Russian accent? Because, if you’re James Franco, you have had some trouble getting mainstream Hollywood work in recent years, after a string of sexual misconduct allegations? Because, if you’re Rob Lowe, you’re kinda sorta a libertarian, on the record defending Ayn Rand, and maybe don’t have that much of a problem with the rest of what the Daily Wire does? Or is it simply because actors like and/or need to work, and don’t care what we think of their politics? Whatever the reasons may be, it’s a real tribute to the craft of the professional actor that such a darkly lit, visually boring movie could be at all watchable. Nearly the entire film takes place inside the prison, sunk inside blue-gray walls the color of a rat’s coat, lit by bare bulbs. There aren’t even flashbacks, or scenes of a prison cafeteria or exercise yard, to relieve the monotony, as other prison movies tend to offer. In one interrogation scene, the camera catches a lens flare from the single bulb, and seeing it is such a relief: something different! I cheered internally when Franco’s interrogator character started getting violent with Alexei—motion, instead of constant speech! Perhaps the film wanted to evoke the trapped feeling of being inside a prison in Moscow in 1938? That’s a lot to ask of the viewer, and the script just can’t carry this much weight. In between interrogations, the professor learns about the evils of the Stalinist regime from his fellow prisoners, a structure that allows the script to lecture vividly on the matter of the violence of the Communist state, most memorably when Nolte’s character describes a scene he witnessed during the Holodomor famine, where a Ukrainian mother hung dead in a doorway while her two children ate her flesh and licked her blood. Why is this man in prison? For being Jewish. “Do you believe a machine that grinds the bones of children to make bread for the ironworkers draws a line at hatred of the Jews?” he asks Alexei, when the professor expresses disbelief. (Then, you see him scratch the words “Workers of the world, shit!” on the wall.) There’s something infantile about Alexei, who improbably got all the way to 1938 without hearing these kinds of stories, and still publicly claims a love of God and a belief in heaven—a dangerous thing, the script makes sure we see. As with the other Daily Wire movies, this one feels like it’s made up of certain favorite conservative talking points cobbled together into scenes that barely feel human. This can be tedious stuff, but here I’ll make my own confession: Despite the canned feeling of the script and the monotony of the direction, I enjoyed seeing Franco on screen again. Broadened out in middle age after his years out of the spotlight, he uses his shifty eyes and shit-eating grin to good purpose in playing Vladimir, a violent and bitter person whose experience in the trenches (we assume during World War I) has turned him into someone who believes only in power. Like most of the characters in this movie, Vladimir barely seems Russian, and definitely doesn’t seem very 1938. But Franco has always had a treacherous charm, and when you’ve stared at dirty men in a dark cell for minutes at a time, a little bit of his characteristic skeevy charisma starts to seem like a break. Believe me, it’s needed in a movie like this. Movies Politics Russia