TV Note: "True Confessions" (1/17)

[David Shasha]

"True Confessions" will be screened on Turner Classic Moves Late Thursday/Early Friday, January 17th at 1:00 AM

Classic Movie Review: "True Confessions" (1981)

 

There are certain classic films that have a deep and lasting impact on us.  We can quote the dialogue from these films by heart and have an abiding love for them that grows exponentially through the years.

 

Such a film for me is Ulu Grosbrad's little-known masterpiece "True Confessions."  The film was adapted by John Gregory Dunne (who passed away last week) and his wife Joan Didion from Dunne's novel, a novel that is a deeply profound meditation on the nature of evil and justice within a very tightly knit religious framework.

 

"True Confessions" is the tale of two brothers, a priest (Desmond Spallacy) played by Robert DeNiro and a police detective (Tom Spellacy) played by Robert Duvall.

 

The story is one that pits the brothers on different sides of the social fence: Monsignor Spallacy is a mover and shaker in the Los Angeles diocese who is bringing the Catholic Church into the modern age by working with wealthy laypeople - some very shady businessmen - to garner material support for the projects necessary to preserve the well-being of the diocese and its institutions.

 

Detective Spellacy is embroiled in some interlocking cases that involve some of these businessmen and indirectly put his brother's Church business into moral question.

 

"True Confessions" is peopled with whores, murderers, the pious and those whose lives stand at the intersection of all of these points.

 

The film is about hypocrisy and redemption, about how we all react to the commonplace and prosaic evils that surround us every day.  Each day we see men whose love of the infernal combination of power and piety corrodes the spirit leaving our religious institutions with the taint of moral ambiguity and the incoherence that comes from those who wrap themselves up in their supposed piety while living a life that relentlessly exploits and mistreats others to garner as much personal power as possible.

 

"True Confessions" is about being haunted by the past and looking to put the ghosts of that past to rest.  It is a frontal assault on the hypocrisy that seems to be endemic to modern religious life, a hypocrisy that is interwoven into the very fabric of our institutional participation.

 

Rather than highlighting and promoting the GOOD, religion today looks to promote what is GOOD for those who have been elevated to the highest ranks of institutional power.  Their social status has, like the central villain of the film Jack Amsterdam, ensured that they be respected by the religious leaders of the community even as they continue to lead lives that are less than noble.

 

The complicity of religious leaders with the base behaviors of the lay leaders is at the core of "True Confessions."  The film boasts a brilliant script filled with incisive and biting social commentary and performances that are disciplined and exceptionally moving.  Ulu Grosbard's direction is sober and unobtrusive, permitting the story and its characters to take center stage.

 

"True Confessions" is a film that in the years since its first release has matured and gotten more relevant and more meaningful to the general audience.  It tells us things that we desperately need to hear in a manner that is morally pure and ethically unambiguous.

 

It is a film that teaches us that God is not a material entity that is there to be laid out as part of our collection of THINGS and as responsive only to those who have the financial means to climb the ladder of social success.

 

"True Confessions" ends with a moving sequence between the brothers at a parish in the desert: a place far away from the high paced pressure cooker of the Los Angeles diocese.  This sequence promotes the idea that true piety can only function outside the hypocritical web that has been woven under the blinding glare of money and power.

 

The film is an affirmation of that small barely audible voice, the qol demama daqqah, that we have often alluded to.  The film teaches us that the righteous can be found outside the Church of organized religion and outside the distasteful light of the internal politics that so overwhelm and corrupt our religious experience.

 

"True Confessions" is a film whose relevance for the spiritual person will never fade.

  

 

 

David Shasha

 

 

From SHU 85, January 7, 2004