Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2003) * * *

Directed by:  George Clooney

Starring:  Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Rutger Hauer, Gene Gene The Dancing Machine, Jaye P. Morgan, The Unknown Comic, Dick Clark


Chuck Barris famously claimed he worked undercover as a CIA operative while producing The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and later The Gong Show.   He wrote these detailed stories in his autobiography, but were these claims true?   In later years, he admitted to applying for a job with the CIA and confessed the CIA stories were mere fantasies.    The movie version, George Clooney's directorial debut, approaches the material in an appropriately offbeat manner.    You think you've seen enough spy movies about ops guys running around Eastern European countries killing each other, but how many have you seen in which the assassin was also chaperoning the couple taking the trip they won on The Dating Game?

For Barris (Rockwell) and his CIA contact Jim Byrd (Clooney), the whole TV producer gig is the perfect cover.   Who would suspect the host of The Gong Show to be a contract killer by night?
It doesn't matter if not one word of what Barris said about the CIA stuff is true, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind has fun with the concept and mines it for all of the intrigue it has to offer.    How exactly would you react if a stranger came to you one day and said you fit the profile of a CIA assassin to a tee?    You don't know whether to be frightened or flattered. 

Clooney has a good feel for the crazy world of 1960's and 1970's television and the crazier world of international espionage.    Chuck is a natural for both worlds.    He can create the wackiest game shows in television history and blow a guy's head off from 50 yards away.   Byrd sells Chuck on "doing it for his country", but in reality, it gives Chuck a chance to do what he would love to do to a network executive who rejects his shows.

Rockwell plays Chuck as a guy with gifts trying to hold himself together as show business and spy business pull him in opposite directions.    We forget the CIA scenes are fiction, and they take on a realistic quality in our minds.    Rockwell delivers a compelling Chuck Barris with a hint of insanity lurking right the eyes.    The game show scenes capture the outrageous nature of the shows themselves, especially when The Gong Show comes along.   Barris is the mad ringmaster trotting out a series of no-talents who want to be on television so bad they don't mind being the butt of the joke.

As far as Barris' personal life goes, he has a girl named Penny (Barrymore), who drifts in his out of his life because his professional lives make it nearly impossible for him to have meaningful relationships.   Yes, he promises when he gets out of a hairy situation in West Berlin that he will spend more time with Penny, but we know this is a case of promises made in the storm being forgotten in the calm.

Clooney assembles some his A-list friends in cameos, including Brad Pitt and Matt Damon as Dating Game contestants who are rejected in favor of an annoying schlub.    Julia Roberts graces the screen as Olivia, Chuck's CIA contact in Europe who assigns him his next hit.  She is shot half in the shadows to deliver a seductive aura of mystery, and she makes it hard for Chuck to stay faithful to Penny.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind isn't exactly a biopic, although there are elements of truth and there was a guy named Chuck Barris and shows like The Dating Game and The Gong Show did exist.    What we are treated to is a dovetailing of two universes which in reality aren't much different from each other.    It's just that Barris is caught in the middle, even if many of the events in the book and film never happened.