...a one-note character study about an unhappy, insecure, delusional paranoiac, whose assassin gimmick wears thin almost before it gets started.
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While it shouldn't be necessary to keep asking the question, "Yes, but did this really happen?," one can't help but do so.
"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" is the 2003 movie adaption of former game-show host Chuck Barris's autobiography, in which he makes the outlandish claim to have been a top-secret CIA assassin before and during the height of his TV career. The claim is at the heart of the story, and while believing or not believing doesn't stop us from having some small degree of fun with the picture, it's annoyingly in the back of our mind all along and tends to be a minor distraction.
Of course, Barris knows that most people won't take his claim seriously and that it's impossible to prove one way or the other, in any case. Obviously, the CIA isn't going to admit to training covert murderers, so it's Barris's word against anybody else's, which I suppose is what made the book into a minor cult hit. But a film works a little differently from a book. People are up there on the screen in flesh and blood. If the story and characters are fictitious, we try to suspend our disbelief and accept them. If the story and characters are factual, we find it easier to go along with them no matter how much license the filmmakers take for dramatic or humorous effect; i.e., "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" or "Fargo." In the case of "Confessions," though, the film never goes far enough in any one direction, so we're not sure how to respond to it.
"Confessions" never persuades us that its premise is anywhere near the truth, nor does it magnify the outrageousness of the contention into pure comedy. Consequently, the film is neither funny enough nor serious enough to win us over. Its black humor is so laid-back as to be practically nonexistent, its espionage thrills are equally missing, and its drama is simply oppressive. The result is a one-note character study about an unhappy, insecure, delusional paranoiac, whose assassin gimmick wears thin almost before it gets started.
The movie, like the character it portrays, is also schizophrenic, going in several directions at once, the first half so different from the second half in style and content, it's almost like watching two separate pictures. We get Barris's life from the time he arrives in Manhattan in 1955 looking for a job in the fledgling television industry until the writing of his autobiography some thirty years later (the book was originally published in 1982), but we see his life in wildly contrasting moods. This, I assume, is what first-time director George Clooney had in mind all along, having the film's odd storytelling technique mirror the oddity of the central character, but it's hard to be sure. The movie's first half is done up in curious, old-time, pastel-tinted postcard colors, wacky camera angles, and an often irreverent, satiric style. The second half is somber and serious, the colors and camera work conventional to a fault. Clooney is ambitious and talented, both flashy and orthodox, but where did he think his film was going by trying to do all things at once, and why did he think his audience would care when we got there?
The screenplay was written by Charlie Kaufman, who also did "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," two more bizarre movies, so maybe that helps explain where this one came from. But in his other work, Kaufman does a better job than he does in "Confessions" to bring together the disparate elements of the script. When the film is over, the only things we know for sure about Barris are that he has a wonderfully creative mind, an insatiable appetite for sex, and a knack for zaniness. People who are interviewed and know him well agree that the whole assassin thing is a put-on; the question is why he would go to the trouble to concoct such an elaborate story except to get attention. Unless, that is, the man is indeed as psychotic as the movie makes him out to be, in which case he is more to be pitied than admired.
Sam Rockwell plays Barris, and although he captures the man's energy and neuroses, I wondered why there was never any attempt to show him age over the years. He looks exactly the same in 1982 as he did in 1955. Was this a subliminal tribute on the director's part to the man's vanity or some attempt to remind the viewer that life is all an illusion, anyway?
As we get to know Barris better, we see a man preoccupied with sex, and as he rises in the television industry, the worse he seems to sink into unhappiness and sexual obsession. He appears to bed virtually every woman he meets, yet he stays adamantly cynical of and away from marriage (ironic considering his creation of "The Newlywed Game"). His longtime girlfriend, Penny (Drew Barrymore), comes and goes through the years; while a sexually liberated person herself, even she is unable to adjust to Barris's continual infidelities and indiscretions.
Somewhere in the sixties, by which time Barris had created and produced such shows as "Hootenanny," "The Dating Game," and "The Newlywed Game," he says he was approached by the CIA to work for them as a trained assassin. He's hired by a government contact, Jim Byrd, as an "independent contract agent." Byrd is played by the actor-director, George Clooney, as a cool, calm, ultra-suave customer, but a character as shallow an enigma as everyone else in the picture. So, why does Barris go along with the deal and commit by his count some thirty-two murders? "Call it patriotism." Apparently, despite the success of his TV shows, Barris still thinks of himself as a loser and feels the killings are a way of redeeming and possibly liberating himself. Then, once he's in, he's told, "You don't play, you don't leave."
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