The Confessional: Dramatic Device Par Excellence

National Catholic Register, 17 April 2020

Hollywood Loves the Place Where Evil Meets Good, Sin Meets Mercy.

The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s grand finale to the mafia film genre. Released late last year and showered with Oscar nominations, the three-and-a-half-hour epic moves toward the only conclusion it could have. The title character, played by Robert De Niro, goes to confession.

How could it be otherwise? The Irishman takes the long view of mob life, asking what it looks like from old age, on the threshold of eternity. The old mobster has evaded justice in this world; even if convicted and imprisoned, the murderer of many is beyond any strict balance of justice. The evil he has done cannot be met with any equitable punishment. And so what the justice of man cannot accomplish must be done by the mercy of God.

The Godfather trilogy of Francis Ford Coppola reaches the same point. In the third installment, when Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is desperately trying to make his family “legitimate,” to launder his money into respectable enterprises, he has to go to confession. He can fool the world and hide from the authorities, but without confession it remains yet another fraud. So he confesses; reluctantly, even skeptically, but he confesses. And it is not cheap mercy. The confessor tells him, “Yours sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer.” Corleone does suffer still more. There is penance.

But it is not just the mafia genre, with its Catholic characters who honor the Lord with their lips while their guns are far from him, that resorts to the confessional. Hollywood loves the confessional, for there is no more dramatic setting. There evil meets good, sin meets mercy.

Continue reading at the National Catholic Register:
https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/the-confessional-dramatic-device-par-excellence