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Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Directed by: George Clooney
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Back in the heady 1970s, a dangerous mind concocted such television inanities as The Dating Game and The Gong Show (which his ego allowed him to host). His name was Chuck Barris.
When the era was over it somehow took Barris by surprise. Though the programs had made him financially secure, there was something missing from his life. He felt all he’d done wasn’t much of a legacy, and in the throes of that angst holed up in a New York City hotel to write a book. Allegedly an autobiography, it meandered through his life as the purveyor of fungible fun by day and a CIA assassin after hours who completed some 50 plus sanctions. The book confounded critics and Barris repaired to Paris.
Veracity aside, the book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind intrigued Hollywood and it attracted and undid many talents for two decades. Most recently it found favor when Charlie Kaufman adapted it, capturing the author’s manic depressive nature and holding out a semblance of credibility for his more outrageous assertions. The resulting film, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell, doesn’t lay claim to knowing where the dividing line between the real and the imagined is situated and that’s its virtue. It’s also its limitation. As well as it recreates a bygone time and Barris’s disheveled state of mind, ultimately there’s nothing to be learned for the character or the film. He doesn’t seem to be anything more than a footprint in the sand, intriguing and impenetrable.
Structured as the rise and fall of a shooting star, the film opens at Barris’s (Rockwell) lowest point. Cached up in a hotel room, he’s let himself go into free fall, unshaven, unkempt; suspicious of anyone who approaches including his girlfriend Penny (Drew Barrymore). Who he is and how he arrived at this point begins to take shape.
Twenty years earlier, he was the brash go-getter who could see the shape of the landscape and find the easy road to success. He wrote a hit single, rose from page to network exec but hit a brick wall as an indie TV producer. It’s supposedly when he was waiting on the fate of one of his program ideas that fate took over. In a seedy bar he encounters Jim Byrd (Clooney) who suggests he’s just the type the government is looking for to train for patriotic, covert missions.
Director Clooney imagines the exchange a la Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train but instead of swapping murders, it’s Byrd who will contract the killings. Barris, following a brief training period, shows few signs of moral compunction. Rather he protests because contract assassination doesn’t fit into his shooting schedule for the recently acquired The Dating Game. Byrd, however, has a different take. Send winning contestants to spy hubs like Berlin and serve as chaperone. When the lights go out, one can slip away and complete the contract.
It’s probably best to view Confessions of a Dangerous Mind not as gospel but as a parable akin to Dino Buzzati’s The Desert of the Tartars, a yarn about a regiment awaiting marauding hordes on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Buzzati, a Milan journalist, said the fiction was really about sitting at one’s desk and waiting for the big story to arrive.
In that way, the assignments are Barris’s distractions - the obligations that get in the way of doing something more meaningful. He is someone with an engrained resistance to commitment or convention and if that’s the profile of a CIA assassin I’ve got a wonderful piece of real estate for you in the Louisiana bayous.
That the film is even worth arguing about is a testament to Clooney’s skill behind the camera and Rockwell’s in the frame. Clooney clearly wants to believe that Barris is at least convinced he was an operator, perhaps even training Hollywood’s other great spy Steven Seagal. He lovingly recreates the era of gaudy game shows and shadowy back alleys inhabited by George Smiley and his ilk.
Rockwell is along for the ride and more than up to the challenge of mood swings and bizarre locales. It’s a total sleight-of-hand that he remains likeable as someone without a moral compass and can feign assurance while totally out of control. It’s in no small part that Barrymore allows this to happen, seeing the goodness hiding in a jungle of neurosis. Clooney’s Byrd serves as an apt doppelganger, a humorless, prodding Jiminy Cricket whispering biddings that cut across the grain of Barris’s character and Rutger Hauer and Julia Roberts work nicely in support as fellow agents who abet and obstruct the protagonist’s other life.
Neither romp nor character study Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a fascinating conundrum. One is involved on a moment to moment basis but ultimately at a loss to discover there’s no punch in its punchline.
A Miramax Films release of a Mad Chance production in association with Section Eight. Produced by Andrew Lazar. Director, George Clooney. Screenplay, Charlie Kaufman, based upon the book by Chuck Barris. Camera, Newton Thomas Sigel. Editor, Stephen Mirrione. Music, Alex Wurman. Production design, James O. Bissell. Costumes, Renee April.
Sam Rockwell (Chuck Barris), Drew Barrymore (Penny), George Clooney (Jim Byrd), Julia Roberts (Patricia Watson), Rutger Hauer (Keeler), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Debbie).
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Release
Date: December 31, 2002
Rated: R
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Starring: Sam Rockwell,
Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Fred Savage
Produced by: Andrew Lazar,
Steven Reuther
Written by: Charlie Kaufman, Chuck Barris
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Distributor:
Miramax
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Review Date: December 31, 2002
