CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS
MIND
Part of the credit for this film’s success must obviously
go to Clooney, who in his first time behind the camera uses interesting
camera techniques, desaturated color filtering, and inventive
editing to create an engagingly surrealistic backdrop on which
Barris’s incredible story is rendered. But it’s mostly
the work of Sam Rockwell (Galaxy
Quest, The Green Mile)
that makes this movie so fascinating. Those of us who remember
Barris from TV will not be able to deny the accuracy with which
Rockwell impersonates the wild, seemingly psychotic, attention-craving
lunatic who danced around the studio with reckless abandon during
episodes of The Gong Show—frankly, I always thought
he was high on coke, but the film makes no such reference—but
it is his depiction of Barris’s private side, as a tormented,
confused, and needy individual that really grabs our empathy.
It would be easy to portray the man as a silly showman with delusions
of a James Bond double-lifestyle, but Rockwell’s portrayal
gives him the depth required to show us that he was, and is, a
real person, with all the strengths and weaknesses inherent in
the human condition. His performance, coupled with Clooney’s
wild yet credible presentation, accomplishes the goal of Kaufman’s
screenplay: to make us not sure. To make us say, “Could Chuck
Barris really have been a CIA assassin?” It’s
a tall order—and they pull it off.
Beginning, as so many autobiographical movies do, near the
end of the story, the film starts with a bearded, reclusive Barris
(Rockwell), holed up in a seedy New York hotel in the early ‘80s,
his days of fame seemingly behind him, contemplating how his life
has spiraled into its present state. After a short visit from
his devoted and long-suffering girlfriend Penny (Drew Barrymore),
whom he never even lets in the door, Barris contemplates how,
at some point, a man compares what he expected his life to be
and what it has become, and realizes that it’s too late to
change it. But perhaps, he decides, his salvation will be to write
a memoir of his bizarre story, getting it all off his chest once
and for all. And so, Confessions is born.
We are transported back to the early ‘50s, when Barris
is simply another guy trying to make it with girls, who starts
out by getting a job as a tour guide at NBC, writing the pop song
“Pallisades Park” which became a big hit for Freddy
“Boom Boom” Cannon, and finally moving to ABC to work
backstage at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. This
portion of the story (which seems to contain an inordinate number
of shots featuring Rockwell’s naked, well-toned butt) illustrates
how his frustration with romance evolved into his creation of
The Dating Game, his disdain for matrimony into The
Newlywed Game, and his desire to eliminate mediocrity into
The Gong Show. In between his TV-related pursuits, we are
privy to his first meeting with Penny, whose hippy-esque desire
for an open relationship seems to fit the commitment-shy Barris
to a tee, and to his association with the shadowy and mysterious
Jim Byrd (director Clooney), who recruits him into the U.S. government’s
plot to foil Communism. Two of his more notable CIA contacts are
played by Rutger Hauer, whose regrets about his profession inspire
Barris to similar introspection, and Julia Roberts, whose chillingly
sexy character becomes Penny’s primary competition for his
romantic attention. As these strangely interrelated stories are
played out, Clooney lends credibility to the film’s central
conceit by including interviews with real-life celebrities who
were associated with the shows (people such as Dating Game
host Jim Lange, Gong Show regular Jaye P. Morgan, and even
Dick Clark), who admit their uncertainty about what Barris was
doing when he would disappear for weeks at a time. The plot, as
they say, thickens.
Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind is, like the Andy Kaufman story Man On The Moon, a wacky movie about a wacky person, a film whose details we are never really sure we are supposed to believe. But perhaps this uncertainty is what makes it so engaging. Not knowing whether we are being told the truth or duped into believing the impossible knocks us a little off-kilter, which is exactly what Barris is best at. His wordless appearance (as himself) at the end of the film seems to underscore that he’s still behind the story. Or maybe he’s just telling us he’s in on the joke. ****
