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CONFESSIONS
OF A DANGEROUS MIND
5/10
USA 2002
: George CLOONEY : 113 mins
In Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney again shows why he’s the most
intriguing leading man Hollywood has had for some time – it’s because
he isn’t really a leading man at all, more of an old-school character
actor who, through various quirks of nature and fame and after many false
starts, has slowly graduated to megastar status. He pretty much steals
the movie as unblinkingly steely CIA operative Jim Byrd, inveigling successful
TV-game-show producer Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell) into a ‘second career’
as a globetrotting hitman for Uncle Sam.
Then again,
in a way it is Clooney’s own movie to steal – Confessions is
his directorial debut and, on this evidence, should perhaps also be his
swansong on the ‘wrong’ side of the camera. He displays classic symptoms
of ‘first-time-itis’ – endless tricksy close-ups, angles and pans, plus
counterproductive Reds-style cutaways to talking-head testimony
from real life witnesses. The result is a curiously inert picture, not
funny enough to be a comedy and too light to be taken seriously as a drama
or thriller. It’s a disappointment on many fronts – Clooney seemed to
have all the makings of a successful actor-turned-director, scriptwriter
Charlie Kaufman (Being John
Malkovich, Adaptation.)
is easily among the most original in the business, and Barris’s tale would
seem to have the makings of a terrific movie.
His small-screen
career is undoubtedly kosher, but the rest is, to put it mildly, a matter
of debate. Kaufman and Clooney takes the story – as recorded in Barris’s
‘unauthorised autobiography’ – at poker-face value. As in the first half
of A Beautiful Mind,
there’s no tipping of the wink that the CIA high-jinks are anything but
100 per cent what they seem to be: we see Barris recruited (echoing Ed
Harris in Beautiful Mind, Clooney’s Byrd admires Barris’s flair
for “problem solving”), trained and sent out into the “field” where he’s
aided by sultry agent Patricia (Julia Roberts, having fun in a vampy,
campy minor role). His activities inevitably start impinging upon his
‘normal life’ with long-time girlfriend and would-be Mrs Barris, Penny
(Drew Barrymore) – and when a fellow operative (Rutger Hauer, made up
to look amusingly like Paul Verhoeven) is bumped off, Barris’s mounting
paranoia sets off a nervous breakdown.
Which is where,
in 1981, the movie begins. It’s a real let-down to see Kaufman resorting
to the most tired format for this kind of pop-culture biopic: to start
with an (unconvincingly) ‘aged’ subject who, at the end of his tether,
looks back over episodes of his life which unfold in chronological detail.
And Barris’s progress slots all too neatly into the hackneyed three act
structure of struggle>success>disaster. Clooney’s template would
seem to be Boogie Nights
(we even get a very P T Andersonish showbiz-party-at-the-poolside)
but, sans flair, the results are much closer to The People vs Larry
Flynt, Blow (from which
the movie steals its ‘end-with-a-still-of-the-real-bloke’ idea) or Catch
Me If You Can.
The Spielberg
movie keeps coming to mind again and again during Confessions –
Barris’s entrée into the world of NBC is straight from the Frank Abagnale
passing-off textbook. More damagingly, cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel
opts for the gauzy glow that was so ill-suited to Catch Me. Sigel
also calls undue attention to his work by manipulating the colours throughout
– a yellowy, very Traffic-esque
bleach during several Mexico sequences, and an even more distracting effect
elsewhere in which the hues have a pastel-ish, artificial tint that recalls
the clumsy ‘colourisation’ process once applied to monochrome classics.
It’s very hard
to adjust to this mildly stylised look – one of several factors that prevents
the audience from fully engaging with the material. The film seems to
take forever to get going, and even then never seems quite worth the effort
needed to keep up. Rockwell gives his all in what is a real showcase role,
Clooney is magnetic and Robert John Burke (America’s most underused actor)
hits the comic bullseye in his brief appearances as a government hardass
– while Clooney’s old pals Brad Pitt and Matt Damon are niftily deployed
in a Dating Game segment. Otherwise, for a Kaufman script especially,
the laughs are surprisingly few and far between – and the spy stuff is
even more awkwardly handled, especially late on. Barris’s final meeting
with Patricia constitutes a notably weak and derivative ‘climax’ to what
has become such an apparently interminable plodder that some viewers may
even wish they could ‘gong it off’ in the style of Barris’s most famous
show.
And what’s
this movie supposed to be about, in any case? At least in A
Beautiful Mind the men-in-hats CIA shenanigans turned out to have
a crucial, crowd-pleasing significance to how the film worked as a drama,
and to the hero’s mental processes. Here, the hit-man angle is patently
nonsensical, and we never get much idea of why Barris would want to make
it up - except to draw even more attention to himself. We know it’s lies,
he knows it’s lies (Believe Me If You Can, perhaps.) So - as the
gleefully foul-mouthed Barris himself might put it - what’s the f**king
point?
10th
March, 2003
(seen same day, Warner Village, Newcastle)
by Neil
Young
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