I can’t say that I have seen all of the movies actor George Clooney has directed, but honestly, the ones I have seen haven’t impressed me much. Maybe if I had seen the likes of Good Night, and Good Luck, but when the things I have seen are the likes of Suburbicon and The Midnight Sky, well, I am not really in a rush to see what else he’s done.
However, his directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind at least has an interesting back story as it is based on the supposedly true memoir of television producer and personality Chuck Barris. Whether or not Barris’s story is the truth, it sure sounds weird and I do like weird.
Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell as an adult, Michael Cera in a scene or two as a kid) is tired of being rejected by attractive women, so he goes into television. Eventually he has two successes: he meets Penny Pacino (Drew Barrymore), whom he will have an on-again, off-again relationship for years to come, and he comes up with the concept of The Dating Game. Success both on the romantic/sexual front and professionally, however, soon brings something unexpected: Barris is recruited by a man named Jim Byrd (Clooney) to do something for the government. What is that thing? Killing foreign nationals on behalf of the CIA. Barris somehow carries out these hits while coming up with more shows like The Newlywed Game and, of course, The Gong Show which Barris also hosted.
It is worth noting here and now that, as Clooney interspersed some interviews with actual people from the real Barris’s life whose recollections, while they don’t exactly confirm the hitman stories, do offer just enough suggestion to make the story seem more plausible. Whether or not Barris’s memoir actually is true, the movie treats his tale as if it is. There’s no real question that Barris made up in the narrative. The movie plays along with it.
That said, I did enjoy this movie. It’s not perfect, but Clooney uses what advantages he can for his first movie. It helped that his various Ocean’s 11 co-stars, at least the more recognizable ones, make at least cameos with a prominent supporting role going to Julia Roberts. Rockwell’s struggle to maintain his sanity as his TV work is ridiculed and set back by censors and the like while his side job of covert assassination takes its own toll is well-played. Rockwell often plays these twitchy iconoclastic sort of characters very well, and he does so here too. Barrymore, as his love interest, may be a more stock character, but she also comes across as sweet and innocent in a world where both of Barris’s jobs are anything but. Really, there are no poor performances here, with a lot of famous faces making nice appearances often for humorous effect. My personal favorite? Maggie Gylenhaal, looking very bored no matter what’s going on with her in the scene.
It helps that Clooney is working off a script from Charlie Kaufman, a man who knows how to craft weird scripts. God knows I didn’t much care for Clooney’s Suburbicon where he was working with an unused Coen Brothers script, but there he clearly added a second, blatantly unsubtle political allegory to the movie that he obviously wrote himself. Here he’s not doing anything like that. Kaufman’s fingerprints are all over this movie, and that really helps. It’s not the best movie I’ve seen with a Kaufman script, but it is easily the best movie I’ve ever seen directed by Clooney. Turns out there’s a talented director in there after all.
Grade: B
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