Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
George Clooney (2002)
Once I’d finished watching George Clooney’s directing debut, from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, the next port of call had to be Wikipedia – to find out more about the film’s subject, Chuck Barris. It’s a long time since I’ve seen an American movie where I felt so clueless about its frame of reference, and in which the film-makers seemed to take for granted prior knowledge of the main character and his context. Barris is, according to Wikipedia, ‘an American game show producer and presenter who was responsible for many of the best known game shows of the 1960s and 1970s’. These shows include, inter alia, The Dating Game (the basis for Blind Date in Britain) and The Gong Show (the early stages of Britain’s Got Talent work on a similar principle to this). Barris’s influence on TV culture is clearly unarguable; but in 1984 he published an autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in which he claimed also to have worked for the CIA as an assassin during the previous two decades. It’s this dual career that forms the narrative of the film.
I assumed at the start – misled by a legend on the screen which I took to mean that Kaufman had drawn on documents which became available posthumously – that Barris was already dead but this turns out to be a gag. At the end, we’re shown a photograph of him, taken in 2002. Wikipedia confirms he’s still alive, now in his eightieth year, and that he ‘tends to neither confirm nor deny … in interviews’ his CIA history. The Agency have hotly denied any truth to Barris’s claims and, as he’s evidently not disclosed any facts about his CIA work that would put the matter beyond reasonable doubt, you can only suppose that the disclosure in his autobiography was as tantalisingly brief as it was sensational.
My main problem with Confessions was that Chuck Barris didn’t seem to me a sufficiently interesting subject for a feature film unless the CIA career was a true story – or made to seem like a true story. (I might have thought differently if I’d already known of Barris as a television figure but that wouldn’t make this a better film.) It’s a good joke that the CIA adventures take place in the various European locations chosen as the destinations for the winning couple in The Dating Game but the style of these sequences is a mixture of slapstick and spot-the-spy-film-references (which I was no good at, although I recognised the John Barry ‘Friday’s Child’ theme from The Quiller Memorandum). They don’t lead anywhere much; and Clooney and Kaufman don’t seem interested in doing much with the ironic or satirical potential of the combination of Barris’s two lines of work. (Both of these, in their different ways, sustain core American values.)
As Barris, Sam Rockwell moves from his late teens to his early fifties yet doesn’t age. He seems unchangingly callow and ingratiating, and I couldn’t help thinking this reflected the actor’s eagerness to please more than that of the character. (There’s no obvious reason to think it was a characteristic of Barris.) Rockwell is proficient but his game-for-anything brightness feels worked up. This appears to have been his first leading cinema role (by coincidence, I’d seen him – for the first time – in Frost/Nixon, just a few days before seeing Confessions). There are times when a relatively unfamiliar actor– as an unknown quantity who doesn’t remind us of himself in other roles – can benefit a film (Adrien Brody in The Pianist is a good example); but I think the reverse happens here and that Rockwell is disadvantaged in the company of Clooney, Julia Roberts, Rutger Hauer et al. (The ‘al’ include Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, as two of the contestant bachelors on The Dating Game.) All these stars can relax into their roles, comfortable in the knowledge that we know who they are and that that’s probably enough with this sort of material. Drew Barrymore (as a girl who’s persistently devoted to Chuck) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (as one who comes and goes from his life more quickly and carelessly) can’t be complacent to the same degree but both are skilful and likeable.
Confessions is brightly coloured and terrifically alive in visual terms (the cinematographer was Newton Thomas Sigel and the editor Stephen Mirrione). It’s reasonably entertaining but it’s not particularly likeable – it’s the only thing I’ve so far seen from him that’s left me feeling a little antipathetic towards George Clooney. The sense of being excluded from a collection of private jokes as you watch this film is irritatingly strong; the attempts to get laughs out of minor characters’ ugly mugs may be the most discomfiting aspect of the cliquishness. (These attempts come across as a smug reminder that it’s better to look like George Clooney or Julia Roberts; and Bachelor No 3 on The Dating Game line-up has to be a geek ghastly enough to counterbalance Pitt and Damon.) The most interesting and mysterious element of Confessions is the contrast between Clooney’s rather chaotic direction – he and his friends evidently had more fun making the film than they’ve been able to impart to the audience – and the extraordinary precision and wit of his own performance as Chuck Barris’s CIA recruiting officer. As an actor, Clooney appears to know exactly what he’s doing – and he’s highly enjoyable – yet neither he nor Charlie Kaufman, although they come up with some inventive moments, seems able to find a coherent way of presenting the Barris story.
30 January 2009