Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

You wouldn't know it from the television ad campaign, which makes Confessions of a Dangerous Mind look like some sort of weird, CIA-assassin vehicle, but the story, from a script by professional oddball Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) revolves around the minor-league, legend-in-his-own-mind television provocateur Chuck Barris. As those of you of a certain age will recall, Barris was the wild card behind the groundbreaking game shows The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and, most tellingly, The Gong Show, a program so divinely warped and sporting such an obvious lack of shame that it rivaled cheeseball porn in the shockingly silly department. The film's title is nicked from Barris' “unauthorized autobiography,” which not only dished the dirt on his various backstage proclivities and the creepy hedonism of the Seventies, but also delved into his longstanding assertion that he was -- at the same time -- working as a double agent for the CIA. Though those claims have been laughed off by many in the industry who know him best (Barris himself refuses to comment one way or the other these days), Clooney and Kaufman use those far-fetched unlikelihoods as the template for a great, bizarre, and ultimately very, very unique film. There's nothing like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind out there right now (and likely there never has been), and while at times it seems to border on straight bio-pic territory (with the usual Kaufman twists, natch), it's still a gleefully crazed debut from Clooney, with a solidly weird turn from Rockwell as Barris. Clooney the director is working here with cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, with whom he worked previously on Three Kings; both films employ a field arsenal of film-stock trickery, with Sigel's penchant for harsh, high-contrast, high-grain film and claustrophobic lighting at the fore. Much of Confessions feels as though it had been shot in Barris' mind, as he roller-coasters from the giddy highs of his early small-screen successes (and his pop-song triumph with the sounds-chaste-but-ain't Top 40 hit "Palisades Park") to romantic disasters, paranoia, and enough self-hating angst to keep all of Prague moping for a year. Rockwell, whose innate knack for self-erasing comedy has been evident at least since Tom DiCillo's 1996 film Box of Moonlight (and was bolstered in the mainstream by fine turns in Charlie's Angels and Galaxy Quest), embodies the Barris role fully. When he's not motor-mouthing his way through the pitch-master's caffeine-jag voice-overs, he's ricocheting from one unlikely incident to another. Clooney shows up as CIA recruiter Jim Byrd, who sees in Barris the kind of auto-focused self-involvement tempered with untapped rage that the Company just loves. Nobody makes a better assassin than a guy with a hit TV show and a seriously antagonistic sense of self-love. Barrymore, as Barris' on/off love interest Penny, does more here than she's done in her past five comedy-lites, but Roberts, as a mysterious spy gal, has little to do but look sexy and act bizarre. Kaufman and Clooney are riffing on the death of the Sixties and that decade's unpalatable metamorphosis into the sickly Seventies via Barris' truly strange life, and while it's not perfect -- it could have been just that much weirder, frankly -- Confessions is without a doubt a memorable directorial debut from King Hunk.