A mind like a steel trap

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Starring Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney… Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Starring Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney

Directed by George Clooney

“I came up with a new game show idea recently,” says the real Chuck Barris at the end of “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.” “It’s called ‘The Old Game.’ You got three old guys with loaded guns on stage. 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 gets a refrigerator.”

If the film’s any indication, Barris probably wouldn’t go home with the fridge.

Not because Barris, played to perfection by Sam Rockwell, realizes he’s the downfall of Western civilization, which many people think he is. Not because he’s remorseful about killing 33 people for the CIA while producing “The Dating Game,” “The Newlywed Game” and “The Gong Show,” a claim which may or may not be true. Instead, it’s the bigger problem, of which these are symptoms: Barris’ “wasted existence.”

Barris’ professional life certainly isn’t a failure. He created landmark game shows, he was a pop culture icon for the better part of a decade, and he (maybe) served his country as a CIA contract killer.

It’s the private life, though, that’s the rub. He’s eccentric, self-deprecating and a sexaholic, his first “experience” coming at age 11 by trapping a girl in perverse childhood circular logic. He meanders through life until his game shows get made. He has a “girlfriend,” Penny (Drew Barrymore), who he loves “in his way.” The closet thing he has to friends may not even exist: Jim Byrd (George Clooney), his CIA boss, and another assassin (Rutger Hauer).

This conflict of professional and private, of fantasy and reality, is the key to understanding Chuck Barris, and it’s in that conflict that first-time director Clooney and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman focus. The result is a well-acted, well-written, wonderfully directed film.

In the simple storytelling, Clooney uses an interesting hodgepodge of straight and documentary filmmaking, using interviews from Dick Clark, Jaye P. Morgan, the Unknown Comic and Gene Gene the Dancing Machine.

But it’s the film’s visual style, which echoes Barris’ comfort away from reality on his game show sets, that heightens the conflicts in his life.

There’s a feeling that everything but the shows only half exist. Everything else in Barris’ existence is placed in the film’s chronology through subtitling. Without that prompting, though, we would have a hard time discerning when and where we are. There’s a murky feel to the “real life” of the film, conveyed through heavy reliance on washed-out cinematography and Soderbergh-like direction.

When the film shifts to the game shows, however, everything’s clear, colorful and fully realized. “The Dating Game,” “Newlywed Game” and “The Gong Show” sets are bright, lively, atmospheric and inviting; they’re everything Barris’ reality isn’t.

Chuck Barris’ life is a conflict between the world he tries to escape from and the worlds he creates for television. Did he make up the CIA stuff? Maybe, but either way it adds another dimension to Barris. The film gives us the information, but we’re left, rather than told how, to decide if he’d win the fridge on “The Old Game” or not, which is a daring thing.