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It isn’t enough that George Clooney is a tremendous movie star, but with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind he proves that he’s got great skill at this whole writer-director thing. Frequently he takes the film into highly stylized territory, at times the film looks incredibly bleached or overly saturated in its colors, but it always feels like a smart choice from a confident hand. Even as the plot goes into increasingly hard-to-believe areas (allegedly based on truth if you believe Chuck Barris), Clooney always keeps things entertaining and appealing to look at.
This is a great hand trick, because the plot is the one thing that’s hardest to swallow in the film. Was Chuck Barris really a CIA operative? Who knows, but Confessions takes his claim at face value. This leads to a fun and quirky first half but a second one that drags badly as it repeats to ever less-interesting effect the basic set-up of Barris trying to juggle his long-suffering girlfriend, game show work and assassination missions. His increasing paranoia is a chance for Sam Rockwell to deliver some great acting set pieces, but after the giddy head rush of fun and humor it’s a bit of a comedown.
Yet Clooney never loses sight of his actors, and gets some surprising work from movie stars Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts. Barrymore is charming and effective as the long-suffering girlfriend. It’s nice to see her actually do some work in a part after years of scrunching her nose and being cute in romantic comedies like Never Been Kissed. And Roberts manages to make an effective femme fatale, being mysterious, dangerous and sexy in equal measure. This is a great surprise to me as I have more or less written Roberts off as a movie star who is only good in romantic comedies but lacks weight as a dramatic actress. Maybe she has depths that we have yet to see? But the film really belongs to Sam Rockwell, a great character actor who has yet to break the mainstream in a major way. He looks quite a bit like the young Barris, makes every twist and turn feel believable, and seems to be having a ball with a part this juicy. Sure, it’s not a great movie, but it’s very entertaining and compulsively watchable.
