Spy Game Show

"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" turns game show producer Chuck Barris inside-out and does not find a smiling face.
 

I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It's called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn't blow his brains out. He wins a refrigerator.

    -Chuck Barris, 2002

    Maybe it was an idea like this that compelled Barris to write an autobiography in which he padded his life's work as a producer of some of television's most kitschy fodder with a claim that he was formerly an assassin with the CIA.  After all, who wants to be remembered as a has-been television personality who, even when he was at his prime, was charged with ushering the downfall of American morals through mass media?  Why carry this kind of baggage when you can say that you were a spy fighting for his country in its hour of greatest need?

    The film adaptation of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind takes two tracks with this.  First, it takes Barris' allegation seriously- if only in the same kind of comedic mix of reality and weirdness that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman brought to Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.  The premise is that Barris was recruited at the beginning of his career as a game show producer and used contestant prize getaways such as trips to beautiful Helsinki (!) as a cover for missions to eliminate enemies to American Freedom & Democracy.  Of course, no one really has bothered to waste the time debating whether or not Barris' story may be true, but in the worlds that Kaufman creates what did and did not happen to the real people he places into his scripts is irrelevant- look how willing he was to give the storytelling keys to fake brother/screenwriter Donald at the end of Adaptation.  And most surprisingly, first-time director George Clooney not only holds his own behind the camera, but actually manages to stay on the same wavelength with Kaufman- a feat that I imagine would stump a few seasoned veterans.  With its garish color scheme, milky, overwhelming lighting, and penchant for facial close-ups and rapid cut-aways Confessions becomes an inside-out biography: in his over-electrified showmanship way, this is what Barris' act of purging would have looked like on one of his own television shows.

    The second track, though, is much darker.  Confessions is also the story of the ultimate anti-hedonist- a man who could find so little pleasure or value in his work, his loves, or himself, that he was compelled to rewrite his life throwing in the same taboos he wasn't allowed to take to the TV public in the 60s and 70s.  The moxie of Barris' "double life" comes from its very embrace of cliches known to anyone who appreciates raw spy fiction: clandestine meetings in rain-swept European alleys, cars of faceless gunmen following you in the night, and the femme fatale: a woman whose trust is suspect but whose beauty is undeniable.  As Dick Clark says at one point of the film (in one of a series of pointless, recollecting vignettes that mar an otherwise solid movie) that Barris "knew what the public wanted" and if he couldn't give it to them as a producer, maybe he could as a killer.

    Whether Barris changed television for good or bad is up to massive debate, but no one can deny his influence.  The Dating Game was an embryo for shows like The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire, part of a long trek to carry the viewing public into the real world bedroom.  In some ways, The Gong Show may have been the inspiration for American Idol, in which I really doubt anyone tunes in to see who wins.  No, I think the appeal lies more in seeing the Darwin's category of competition with little or no talent being knocked over on camera like so many bowling pins.  I wonder if Barris finds any irony that today The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game are considered bygones of a time in which TV had that elusive quality of "values" when, at the time he was making them, he was described as Satan incarnate. 

    The mix of comedy and lament doesn't go over easy, but Clooney provides a fine balance.  When things are beginning to get a little too morose, he trots out a sequence of sparkling wit.  And there are plenty of them.  One of my favorites is when Barris (Sam Rockwell) is threatened with cancellation by ABC if he can't get the seemingly wholesome contestants' impromptu potty mouths to clamp up, he remedies the situation with a "friendly" talk by an FCC official to the contestants before the show.  This, in itself, isn't the joke.  I wouldn't be that cruel to give it away.

    Much of the casting is a surprise.  Long-time-no-see Dutch actor Rutger Hauer pops in briefly as a German spy with unclear intentions.  Julia Roberts, last seen with Clooney in Ocean's 11, puts up her frosty side as Barris' CIA co-partner in crime and occasional lover.  Clooney himself appears as Barris' recruiter and contact, a man so stringent in his beliefs and so beaten and world weary by the end of the film it isn't surprising that he doesn't tell Barris that he is bleeding into the pool.  Other Ocean's 11 alum Brad Pitt and Matt Damon also have cameos as passed-over contestants on The Dating Game.

    As Barris, Rockwell (The Green Mile) indulges himself in Barris' insane desperation.  This is not a sympathetic performance and all the better for it.  When he shows up on stage during The Gong Show, scanning the catwalks for assassin planning to do him in, the only regret he breathes is that he couldn't do more- but what more he wanted to do is a frightening question to ask.  As Roberts says, "Insane asylums are filled with people who think they're Jesus or Satan. Very few have delusions of being a guy down the block who works for an insurance company."  Confessions of a Dangerous Mind isn't the story of game shows or spies or double lives, but of a man with a facetious regret- not that he devoted his life to building a pile of dung.  No, many have done that and there are great masses of people who would settle for that in lieu of building nothing.  The regret of Barris is that he wasn't allowed to stay around to keep adding to it.  B+