Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
by George Clooney

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DVD Reviews of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

DVD Review: Great film, but recalls "Beautiful Mind"
Summary: 4 Stars

The flick opens with Barris as a desiccated loser going to hell in a seedy NY hotel room in 1981. Penny, a love interest played Drew Barrymore, tries to save him, but Barris's sins are too great - he must tell all. Flashback to a younger Barris, the perfect loser - a sexually challenged/driven white male whose inability to connect costs him the few chances of love that come his way (despite, or more likely, because of how sexually knowing he was as a child). By the late 1960's, at a creative, career and romantic nadir, Barris is implausibly recruited for the CIA by a charming cold warrior named Jim Byrd (George Clooney). Conceiving the idea for "The Dating Game" while learning how to torture and kill The Enemies of the American Way (in some apparently disused industrial park where it's always winter), Barris becomes a perfect killer (he's the only recruit who can shoot straight). After a few apparently successful CIA missions, Barris's career and life pick-up. The networks become interested in "Dating Game", and he gets serious with Penny. When Byrd reappears, Barris hits on a "perfect" idea to explain his trips abroad - with winners on "Newlywed" and "Dating" winning trips to exotic Helsinki and glamorous West Berlin to go with their Amana refrigerators.

Unfortunately, Barris learns to hate himself - for both halves of his life (we learn that he was very sensitive to criticism, which he earned when creating "Gong"), and when the networks cancelled his shows, he withdrew to a lonely existence with nothing to protect his fragile ego from the scorn it earned.

This flick is a bit of a gem, but it loses much of its inventiveness in the 2nd half (it takes a real nosedive after Barriss's inspiration for "Gong"), and it's never the laugh riot the trailers make it out to be. The flick suffers because of its dual story, neither connecting with the other, no matter how the plot tries to unite Barris the Prime-time impresario with Barris, the CIA killer. In that vein "Confessions" seems to unintentionally mirror "A Beautiful Mind" - loose espionage subplot with a charismatic spymaster/mentor (Clooney instead of Ed Harris); the spy characters breeze in and out of Barris's life, including the wedding scene, without ever touching Barris's career or Penny. The "spy" story is inherently unreal, and it hurts more than helps "Confessions" because it quickly begins to appear like something Barris cooked up to explain his unproductive life. Instead of a purveyor of horrible TV, profiting at the exploitation of average (untalented) Americans, Barris was a death-defying spy and himself a victim of exploitation. The point is made best when one of Barris's more pitiable gameshow contestants victims is revealed as an enemy spy (and apparently a more valuable one), but it's made much too early in the film. Unlike the guys who made "Beautiful Mind", "Confessions" can't divorce itself from the idea that somebody will buy Barris's spy story and its meaning, instead of Barris story of a guy who made millions from humiliating countless Americans.

Unreality is reinforced by the spies' characters - Julia Roberts supposedly worked less than a week on this movie, and it shows (as a sexy spy who doesn't let her cold war smarts keep her from going to bed with Barris faster than any of the other women who reject him immediately; the story improbably allows Barris to get the better of her in the end); George Clooney (who improbably settles on Barris as prime killer-material immediately after watching him lose a bar fight) and even Rutger Hauer as a drunk CIA operative who eludes an East Berlin dragnet that nets Barris, yet succumbs to a KGB mole that Barris eludes. The implausible premise (well known and presumably recognizable pop-culture figure being sent undercover) doesn't help, and the fact that Barris's less plausible life as a spy is the one he runs to (rather than from, despite its menace), underscore how invented it sounds.

The spy-plot is a shame, because the film reveals a dark secret of Barris's past, one that frames the sorrow that sets the tone for the entire film, yet one neglected in favor of its sexier subplot. Barris, it turns out, is a surprisingly sympathetic and even acceptable character by the end of the flick, which is otherwise wholly draped in shadows. Despite its loyalty to the spy-subplot, the script bravely reconciles us with Barris as the master of exploitation, and makes clear that Barris can face that sin as well. This is a film that won't appeal to everybody, but it's a clear sign that we need to see more from Clooney and Sam Rockwell.

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