Movie Log: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

I had high hopes for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, since I remembered the critics' reactions being strongly positive. (It's at 78% at RottenTomatoes, for example.) I'd also gotten the impression that it was a comedy, or at least had strong comedy elements.

But I found it more disappointing than successful, and didn't see much humor in it.

Confessions is the movie adaptation of Chuck Barris's autobiography of the same name; it was also George Clooney's first movie as a director. Barris was a major game-show producer through the sixties and seventies, creating The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game and becoming best known as creator and host of The Gong Show. All that would presumably provide enough material for any normal bio-pic.

But Barris also claimed, in his autobiography, to have been a CIA assassin for many years -- the same years when he was a busy working producer. And so the movie has to address that, which it does by at first seeming to stage the CIA scenes in a less realistic, more cartoony way. But that doesn't follow through, and, by the end, the movie is taking the CIA-assassin material completely seriously, which turns it into just another melodrama.

I've seen speculation that the assassin material was Barris's weird metaphor for drug addiction, and the movie could have worked much better if it had maintained some disbelief in Barris's double life. His claims are frankly ridiculous, and buying into them so readily turns Confessions of a Dangerous Mind into a historical thriller. (It's a stylish thriller, yes, with good performances from Sam Rockwell as Barris, from Clooney as his CIA handler, and from Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts as the major women in the two sides of his life, but it should have been more than that.)

Also: there's a lot of narration in Barris's voice early on, which then mostly disappears, and the early scenes set up that the movie will be about Barris's string of women, and that also drops out. The script was by Charlie Kaufman, and apparently was rewritten by Clooney on set. This might be just the usual sour-grapes, but I have to wonder if Kaufman's original version was more coherent and had more of a point of view.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is entertaining precisely to the degree that you can believe that Chuck Barris really was a CIA assassin. The larger your screen, and the higher your suspension of disbelief, the more you'll enjoy this movie.