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Film Description
Based on notorious television producer Chuck Barris' unauthorised autobiography, George Clooney's directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, sees Sam Rockwell play Barris, a fresh-faced dreamer who moves to New York to find success in television. Pretty soon, he's written a hit song, shacked up with Penny (Drew Barrymore), and has his first successful game show, The Dating Game. But as if that weren't enough, he is soon recruited by CIA Special Agent Jim Byrd (Clooney) to become a hired killer for the federal government. As Barris' subsequent shows take off, the producer uses them as a front for his undercover job, chaperoning winning couples all over the world while performing his deadly duties after hours. Along the way, he meets a shady cast of characters - including a sultry assassin (Julia Roberts) - who threatens to blow his cover and ruin his television career forever.
It’s a bizarre comedy, scripted by Charlie Kaufman, author of Adaptation and Being John Malcovich.His source was the unauthorised autobiography of Chuck Barris, creato... more >
It’s a bizarre comedy, scripted by Charlie Kaufman, author of Adaptation and Being John Malcovich.His source was the unauthorised autobiography of Chuck Barris, creator of such schlock tv series as The Gong Show, Newleywed Game and The Dating Game (Blind Date in UK.)
In this unreliable memoir, he claimed that in addition to his tv work he was recruited by the CIA, trained as a hitman, and employed to assassinate the nation's enemies in Europe and America. His cover was that he was accompanying Dating Game contestants to exotic places.
At the start Barris holes up in a NY hotel to write his memoirs whilst having some sort of breakdown, He was only capable of producing dismal audience participation shows but his life is transformed by CIA agent (George Clooney) who initiates him into world of spies. Barris, a Walter Mitty figure, is uncertainty of his own identity and driven by self-loathing.
The problem is that we share his feelings. We are not asked to identify with him, which is just as well as he is totally unsympathetic.The best thing about this film was its send up of Barris’s awful TV shows. The worst was that Barris’s mind was less dangerous than boring –a suitable adjective to describe the entire film
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When a single woman picks a paunchy, balding loser over Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, you know something’s afoot, or that we’re back once more inside the crazy world of Ch... more >
When a single woman picks a paunchy, balding loser over Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, you know something’s afoot, or that we’re back once more inside the crazy world of Charlie Kaufman. Working from a Kaufman script, George Clooney here makes his directorial debut - with a little help from his Ocean’s 11 friends, by telling the story of a man who claims to have played a major part in both the Cold War and the ratings war: minor American celebrity Chuck Barris, whose ‘unauthorised autobiography’ revealed that the creator of The Dating Game and The Gong Show may also have been a CIA hitman.
Barris (played here by Sam Rockwell) follows John Cusack’s puppeteer in Being John Malkovich and Nicolas Cage’s writer in Adaptation as another of Kaufman’s (sym)pathetic oddballs; he’s first seen hanging around TV studio sets, desperate - as were this writer’s previous characters, to get in on the act. Here, the operating delusion works both ways: Barris’s fantasy is either that of a purveyor of trash television, disappointed in himself for failing to change the world and imagining he could have more influence on the international scene; or it’s that of a genuine killer craving the populist touch (You’re not like all the other murderers, coos Julia Roberts’ rival agent Patricia).
Clooney, working up a signature style somewhere between the Coen brothers and the David O. Russell of Three Kings, coaxes superlative performances (Rockwell, an exceptional supporting player, copes superbly with the promotion to a lead role; Rutger Hauer has a very enjoyable cameo) and fills the frame with unusual, interesting background detail. Like Fargo, this starts with a barely believable story and then builds up a credible tissue of corroborating evidence around it. Barris’s real-life colleagues appear in talking-head inserts, revealing how their boss wouldn’t show up at work from time to time, offering speculation about how those gaps were filled.
It has neat plot points - The Dating Game’s lousy holiday prizes are explained away as locations for future CIA hits, but getting a fantasist like Kaufman to rework a fantasist's memoirs means that, while there’s plenty of tenderness (twenty years on from E.T., Drew Barrymore as Barris’s one constant, his soulmate Penny, still convinces as a picture of radiant innocence) and many rug-pulling laughs, there’s only a sporadic sense of threat. Nonetheless, anyone finding it hard to believe that a government would recruit zerocelebs to do their dirty work might like to consider all those parties Tony Blair held on his arrival at 10 Downing Street, not to mention the influence on – and access to, the general public currently possessed by the likes of Davina McCall and ‘So Much’ Graham Norton.
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