The Confession (1999)

[Landerico Benson]

Afterhis young son dies from the negligence at a hospital, Harry Fertig takes matters into his own hands and kills the doctors responsible. Slick lawyer Roy Bleakie, looking only to win a case and not caring of the matters involved, is assigned Fertig's case. Shocked to hear that his client wants to plead guilty, the case causes Bleakie to question his own morals by defending an honorable man.

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It's slow. It's muted. A couple of early scenes are awkwardly staged. Most of the first half takes place in muted, heavily carpeted interiors, where Alec Baldwin continuously purses his lips. Then Baldwin's character gets baptized, really baptized, with whiskey because it's the only liquid available. At that point, you either buy into the film's complex moral exploration, or you just don't care. I found myself caring to a surprising degree. This is a quiet, dialogue-heavy courtroom drama, where Baldwin is slowly, inexorably redeemed by Kingsley's character, losing the world, but gaining his soul. If that sounds like your sort of thing, this will also be right up your alley. If not, steer clear. Also, as good as Baldwin and Kingsley (as well as Amy Irving) are here, Kevin Conway steals the show. He's amazing.

It is hard to imagine your parents as young people, when you are older than they were when they reared you. We understand other adults, but it is so hard to see parents clearly; we still regard them through the screens of childhood mystery. In his old age, the thoughts of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman have turned toward his childhood, and particularly toward the secrets of his parents' marriage.

His father was a Lutheran minister. His films paint his mother as a high-spirited woman who often found her husband distant or tiresome. Both his parents were steeped in religion and theology, which did not prevent them from doing wrong, but equipped them to agonize over it. In four films, one as a director and three where others directed his screenplays, Bergman has returned to the years when he was a child and his parents were in turmoil. "Fanny and Alexander'' (1983) was a memory of childhood. Bille August's "The Best Intentions'' (1992) was the story of the parents' courtship.

"Sunday's Children'' (1994), directed by Bergman's son Daniel, was about the boy's uneasy relationship with his father. Now comes "Private Confessions,'' the story of his mother's moral struggles. He calls these films fictions because he imagines things he could not have seen, but there is no doubt they are true to his feelings about his parents. One would not live to 81 and tell these stories only to falsify them.

"Private Confessions,'' based on Bergman's 1966 book, has been directed by Liv Ullmann, an actress in many of his best films. The cinematographer is wise old Sven Nykvist, his collaborator for 30 years.

The actress playing Anna, his mother, is Pernilla August, who also played Anna in "The Best Intentions.'' Uncle Jacob, Anna's spiritual adviser, is Max von Sydow, the tall, spare presence in so many Bergman films from "The Seventh Seal'' onward.

The film is divided into five "conversations.'' An explanation is offered early, by Uncle Jacob. It is often wrongly thought, he tells Anna, that Luther abolished the Catholic sacrament of confession. Not exactly. He replaced it with "private conversations'' in which sins and moral questions could be discussed with an adviser.

Jacob led young Anna through her confirmation, and they meet again as the film opens in the summer of 1925. She confesses to him that she has been an unfaithful wife. She has cheated on her husband, Henrik, with a younger man, Tomas. Both men are theologians.

Jacob tells her she must break off the relationship and tell everything to her husband. In the second conversation, set a few weeks later, she follows his advice, and we see that Henrik (Samuel Froler) is a cold man who views adultery less as a matter of passion than as a breach of contract. No wonder, he shouts, that the house contains "chipped glasses, stained cloths, dead plants.'' The third conversation takes place before the other two, and involves a rendezvous between Anna and Tomas, which she has arranged in the home of a friend. Here we get insights into the nature of their relationship, and there is the possibility that for a lover Anna may have selected the man similar to her husband. He feels "gray and inadequate,'' Tomas tells her the morning after, and keeps repeating, "One must be true.'' Is it Anna's fate to forever dash her passion against the stony shores of men who think before they feel? The fourth conversation, which contains the heart of the film, takes place 10 years later, when Jacob is dying, and wants to know the truth about what happened--about whether Anna followed his advice. She lies to him to spare his feelings.

They take communion together, and that sets up the fifth conversation, which takes place before all the others, the day before young Anna's confirmation. In it she confesses to Jacob that she does not feel ready to take communion the next day. One must, of course, be in a state of grace and readiness to take the sacrament, and she does not feel she is. His advice to her at this time is the best he ever gives her.

The film is not about sex or adultery. It is about loneliness, and the attempt to defeat it while living within rigid moral guidelines. To understand it completely, we have to remember "The Best Intentions,'' which tells the story of Anna and Henrik's courtship, and shows her as warm and generous, he as already crippled by a cold childhood and an inferiority complex. There is just the hint--the barest hint, a whisper only--that the one man in Anna's life who might have given her what she craved was Uncle Jacob.

A film like "Private Confessions'' makes most films about romance look like films about plumbing. It is about Bergman's eternal theme, which is that we are all locked in our own boxes of time and space, and most of us never escape them. They have windows but not doors. Anna's problem is not morality but consciousness. To know herself is to accept that no one else will ever truly know her. Her final lie to Jacob accepts this truth, but at least as he dies she can make his own cell a little more peaceful.

Her mother was a waitress at the California lodge in 1998 and Stayner lived in an apartment above the restaurant. Lenna said that at the time, Cary Stayner, in his 30s and handsome, appeared \"safe\" to her, her mother and younger sister.

He brought the girls illustrations he'd drawn himself and bought them a new Beanie Baby, a popular toy in the '90s, each time he'd see them, she said. Lenna, who asked that ABC News withhold her last name, said he also taught the two how to dive.

\"He would show us how to point your toes or how to put your arms forward and dive perfectly into the pool,\" she told ABC News' \"20/20\" in an exclusive interview. \"My sister and I both wanted to be the best at it. It feels like it was so long ago that you forget that it even happened and feels like, almost like a dream or ... a movie that you watched.\"

That dream ended for Lenna in 1999, when she learned from authorities that Cary Stayner was not only responsible for the brutal slayings of four women in and near Yosemite that terrified residents and tourists, but that he'd also tried three separate times to kill her and her family.

\"It's very disturbing. I see two little girls, very innocent and very pure and very much so loving towards this man that wanted to do some horrible things to us,\" Lenna said. \"He was right under everyone's nose. The entire time he was right there!\"

In December 1972, his 7-year-old brother, Steven Stayner, was abducted in Merced, California, by pedophile Kenneth Parnell and accomplice Ervin Murphy. For seven years, Steven Stayner lived with Parnell, moving from one city to another, as the man sexually abused him.

\"Cary was very upset. I heard stories about him going out and wishing on a star, that his brother would come home. I believe he was supposed to have been with his brother. So I believe that there was some guilt with Cary on the fact that maybe he felt a little responsible,\" said childhood friend Mike Marchese in 1999.

\"It seemed as though he had a compulsion with trying to get close to women or be sexual with them. But he was unable to develop any sort of interpersonal relationships with any women,\" said TV reporter Ted Rowlands.

During this time, Parnell kidnapped a 5-year-old child in Ukiah, California and held him captive for two weeks before Steven Stayner escaped and took the child to the police. Steven Stayner was eventually reunited with his family and hailed as a hero. He made some money consulting on a TV film written about his horrifying ordeal and got a reward for rescuing the 5-year-old boy.

But, at the age of 24, Steven Stayner, by then a husband and father of two, was killed in a motorcycle crash. Not long after Steven Stayner died, Cary Stayner's uncle was fatally shot in a home the two men shared.

\"Steven's dead. Uncle Jerry's murdered. This rage is starting to bubble up. Cary has a couple of nervous breakdowns. One was fairly violent,\" Flynn said. \"They got him to a mental health center, but he left. He was there for a couple of hours.\"

\"Cary still didn't talk to anyone about Steven. Whatever damage that had [been] inflicted on Cary, I think he kept to himself. The obvious question is whether what happened to Steven caused Cary to do what he did,\" Flynn said.

When Cary Stayner was in his 30s, he drove his car -- a 1972 pale blue International Scout -- to El Portal and got a job as a handyman at the Cedar Lodge. The rustic lodge was just 7 miles outside the gate of Yosemite, where he sought refuge and got high on marijuana. He was also convinced that he'd seen Bigfoot while out in the woods.

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