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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2003)
George Clooney
Impression published on Thursday, 2010-04-15 | Film | 2 stars
OK, so here you've Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) writing this movie; George Clooney is directing it and playing a minor supporting part; Sam Rockwell (Moon, Heist), who is turning out to be one of those "greatest actor of his generation" type guys, stars; and you've got just an embarrassing amount of celebrity firepower in the supporting- and bit-player section, including Rutger Hauer, Julia Roberts, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Dick Clark, etc.
It's kind of insane.
And, what's more, you've got this barrel of celebrity monkeys bringing its collective acting chops to bear on the dramatization of the Borges-ian "autobiography" of network television's most prolific sleaze-monger, Chuck Barris.
And Barris, who conceived of and produced The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show (among others), just so happens to be so bat-shit crazy that, rather than simply writing about lobotomizing however-many generations of couch potatoes, instead chose publish the story of how he singlehandedly knocked 30 points off of America's average IQ while simultaneously carrying out 33 assassinations as a contract killer for the CIA.
And given all that, you might expect that this thing would be a knock down, drag out, edge-of-the-seat laugh riot of dark social satire and explosive espionage.
But, as the old saw goes, expectation is the mother of disappointment and, as it turns out, this movie is kind of a snooze-fest.
I'm not saying that it's not good or that I regret having sat through it, but I do feel like I endured it more than I enjoyed it and, honestly, the thing just drags: at just under two hours long, there's way too much foreplay in this film and not nearly enough sex.
The "real life" half of the plot relies on familiar celebrity sociopath tropes and a handful of pithy bon mots from its celebrity narrators for its tone. And, in dramatizing a descent into madness that is neither convincing nor complete (if Apocalypse Now dives into the ocean of insanity, Confesisons of a Dangerous Mind inadvertently walks under some window washers' rope scaffolding and gets a drop or two of warm water on its shirt), it feels like it is both pulling punches on Barris (who was, indeed, involved in the production) and holding back on Big Media and American mono-culture as well.
And, as anyone knows, a satirist who won't occasionally throw off his gloves doesn't leave very many marks on his opponent.
Most disappointingly, perhaps, is how the magical reality, spy-versus-spy stuff, while stylish, doesn't help the non-magical reality along in any meaningful way: mostly it exists in a narrative silo--Barris "two lives" never meaningfully overlap--and is almost always thematically out of sync with or tonally contrary to Barris' primary reality: the final result is that you've got these scenes that feel unintentionally disjunct and detract more from the main narrative than they contribute to it.
And the final result of the picture itself is therefore a kind of classic "old Hollywood" type production where a big name (i.e. Clooney) puts out a so-so script about a subject that he and his co-starring buddies think is eminently entertaining, but which is doomed from pre-production to miss the popular and critical marks on account of its lack of editorial discipline and thematic urgency.
