True Confessions

On the short list of quality cinematic treatments of the Catholic priesthood, I offer 1981’s True Confessions with typically stellar performances by Roberts DeNiro and Duvall. Set in L.A., immediately after WWII, DeNiro plays a bright and ambitious monsignor who is ascending within the hierarchy due to his financial and political prowess; Duvall is his kid brother, a hard-nosed homicide detective with personal familiarity with the seamier side of life. The two worlds collide into each other due to the double lives of prominent Catholic leaders. The film is interesting and engaging on several levels.

The two stars play off each other as brothers very well and the explosive combination of love, competition and resentment between them is very realistic.

The movie also offers a perspective on a darker side of the phenomenal growth of the Church in those post-war years, especially the growth in Church buildings, schools and plants. The DeNiro character personalizes the cost in moral integrity incurred by this expansion in property, power, status and glamour. Combined with Philip Lawler’s insightful book The Faithful Departed, the movie illuminates the secularization and corruption quietly at work in those decades leading up to the deconstruction of the late 60s.

The sacrament of confession becomes a pivotal point in the movie as protagonists confess to the compromised monsignor who himself, interestingly, confesses to an older and holier cleric who happens to be his enemy within ecclesiastical politics. Generally, the portrayal of the sacrament is fair and true although some sequences raise serious questions for a Catholic. (Example: towards the end, the villain confesses with an indignant and wrathful disposition blatantly lacking in contrition and purpose of amendment and yet receives absolution.)

The movie portrays the distasteful sexual violence and the intriguing moral ambiguity of the film noir genre. However the radiance of redemptive grace does, in the end, prevail to dispel the heavy darkness that dominates throughout. This conclusion suggests the operation of an (at least implicitly) Catholic imagination in its sensitivity to genuine contrition and conversion.

Truthful treatment of the priesthood is a rarity in the movies; even rarer are quality presentations of the sacraments in their simplicity, efficacy and mystery. This movie qualifies for that short list. The sacrament of penance seems to be the one most congenial for cinematic drama. Hitchcock’s I Confess and the riveting confessional confrontation between the DeNiro conquistador and Irons’ Jesuit in The Mission are surely at the top of the list. A scene of Eucharistic desecration and personal heroism by the sainted Archbishop in Romero is also unforgettable and inspirational.

The dark nature of True Confessions leaves it less than ideal for devotional viewing during lent. But for Saturday night entertainment, it might serve as remote preparation for Sunday morning Eucharist due to its subtle sense of the workings of Grace even in the corruption of sin