Barris also fancies himself a writer, and among his three ill-composed books is the 1982 volume that's the basis for actor George Clooney's startlingly impressive debut as a movie director, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. As you may know by now, Barris claims that Confessions is a nonfiction memoir, while most people -- including, quite obviously, Clooney and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman -- regard it as sheer fantasy. The bone of contention is not slight. Along with being a self-proclaimed Casanova and a successful game show host, Barris would also have us believe he was once a trained CIA killer who, in his spare time, assassinated enemy operatives in exotic world capitals.
Anyone who thinks Barris, now retired and living in New York, is telling the truth probably has a good working relationship with the Easter Bunny and believes that the black-clad secret agent in A Beautiful Mind is real too. As for the present moviemakers, they have cleverly parlayed Barris' quaint fiction into a fascinating, frequently hilarious meditation on delusion, self-loathing, and personal salesmanship.
As interpreted by Clooney and Kaufman (whose postmodern bona fides as a screenwriter include the surreal mind-trip Being John Malkovich and the new comic metafiction Adaptation), Barris is a hustler so committed to his con that he falls for it himself. Portrayed by Sam Rockwell, late of Welcome to Collinwood and Heist, Barris comes off as one of the creepiest movie characters in memory -- a pathological liar and crass opportunist who shoved his way into the television industry via his early gig as an NBC studio page, then trampled friends and foes alike en route to his fleeting fame and success. Appropriately, The Dating Game boils up from his cheap skirt-chasing fantasies, The Gong Show (on which incompetent show-biz dreamers were booed off the set) from his own deep self-hatred. "I would be a millionaire," this unsympathetic worm imagines. "Everyone would love me."
But Barris' self-aggrandizing James Bond fantasies (cooked up in a seedy New York hotel room after his TV career crashed) are the most bizarre thing here. With great skill and scary wit, Clooney, Kaufman, and Rockwell get inside Barris' disordered brain and give free rein to his imagined secret missions. Under the tutelage of a CIA recruiter named Jim (Clooney himself), Barris kills a mustachioed bigwig in the shimmering heat of Mexico City, offs a dangerous commie in snowy Helsinki, and puts his head together with a philosophical secret agent (Rutger Hauer) in cold war Berlin. Wearing a series of foreign-intrigue wigs, a luscious Julia Roberts slinks through the international shadows as the mysterious femme fatale Patricia, a sister agent who quotes Nabokov from memory, speaks four or five languages, and, quite naturally, has the hots for our boy.
In the course of these fervid fictions, Clooney indulges cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel in a lot of tricked-up effects meant to signal distorted states of mind and heightened paranoia levels. Sharp acting does the job just as well. Yet despite the excesses, Confessions comes off as a brilliant and unsettling comedy about one twisted dreamer's outrageous fantasies and the ways he tried to sell them to the world -- and to himself. On the surface, the film affects an air of ambiguity about Barris' spy-assassin claims, but in the end, we know exactly where it stands.
