The Confession

I'm not a particularly avid follower of movie actors, or of movies as they're released, which probably explains why I found "The Confession"--and Alec Baldwin's performance in it--so surprising. I'd heard nothing about this film and saw it quite by accident.

Movies like "The Confession"--that is, movies with moral dilemmas at their center ("It's not hard to do the right thing; it's hard to know what the right thing is" is the central dilemma of the film)--often bypass the ambiguities of complex moral questions in favor of a single answer everyone can love.

In this film there are moral ambiguities aplenty, and the film deals honestly with the difficulty of facing those ambiguities head-on and taking a clear position. Alec Baldwin's performance was startling and complex--a beautiful thing to watch. The supporting cast, including Amy Irving, was top-notch, too.