CONFESSION

Ben Shapiro’s Secret MAGA Movie Savaged by Critics

Reviewers think Shapiro’s interrogation movie should interrogate its own bad storytelling.

MAGA podcaster Ben Shapiro’s screenwriting debut is getting brutalized by critics.

Confession is an over-2-hour interrogation drama set almost entirely in Lubyanka Prison in 1938 Soviet Moscow. The movie, produced by Shapiro’s company, The Daily Wire, features some big-name stars: Rob Lowe, 62, plays Alexei, a former professor and current prisoner of the state, and James Franco, 48, plays Vladimir, Lowe’s military interrogator and former student. Nick Nolte and Jennifer Jason Leigh also appear in the film.

Variety called the film “talky and sluggish,” rife with “stilted dialogue.” The writing and drab cinematography rendered viewers “inordinately aware of the passing of time and the stasis of the storytelling,” the review continued. Plot devices are so blatant they seem almost juvenile; the audience becomes aware of Alexei’s unhappiness when he’s “licking up vodka he accidentally spilled on the floor” of his apartment.

The review said the “tough-going” movie seems to have lifted “more than a few plot elements” from other, more successful dramas.

“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,” the review reads.

The Hollywood Reporter also critiqued Shapiro’s needlessly wordy script. Reviewer Frank Scheck said that Alexei and Vladimir’s interaction “becomes less an interrogation than a literary salon in which the names of Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy are dropped so often that a drinking game could be devised from it. The endless verbiage (the film runs a numbing 132 minutes) proves stultifying.”

Slate’s Rebecca Onion wrote that Confession “surprisingly…feels passably like a real movie—if not one I could recommend most people see.” She criticized the film’s unimaginative technical aspects, calling it “a darkly lit, visually boring movie.”

“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,” Onion wrote. “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!”

“As with the other Daily Wire movies,” she continued, “this one feels like it’s made up of certain favorite conservative talking points cobbled together into scenes that barely feel human.”

The movie’s lone glowing review comes from The Free Press, the Trumpy Bari-Weiss-founded media company. Weiss now runs CBS News and has done serious damage to 60 Minutes.

Weiss and Shapiro have appeared on one another’s platforms, and The Free Press partnered with The Daily Wire to host an exclusive screening of Confession on Nov. 12, including a conversation and reception with Shapiro and Weiss.

The Free Press told the Daily Beast that the event was closed to the press. Tickets cost $250, and the platforms allowed access only to paid subscribers of The Free Press, whose review called the movie “a masterpiece.”

Rod Dreher praised the movie for what other reviewers found to be an overload of references to Russian literature, and for Shapiro’s writing: “Few writers have ever peered so deeply into the human heart,” Dreher wrote of the man who has expressed a stark misunderstanding of female anatomy, argued that America’s Civil War was an “apology” for the institution of slavery, and who said climate change wasn’t an “emergency” because people whom climate-induced flooding affects can simply “sell their homes and move.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Scheck feels differently than Dreher.

“Confession proves a dull, turgid slog,” he wrote.

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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