Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
You can't wring much sympathy out of seeing a bad movie. Sure, you blew a couple bucks, you wasted a couple hours. But it was just a movie, right? It's not as though you were in a prison camp. It's not like they shoved bamboo under your fingernails, or beat your shins with a rubber hose. Well, not usually. Bad movies are as common as houseflies, and in general not more distressing. But now and then comes alon something so traumatic, so brutally awful, that it can scarcely be called a movie at all. Last night we survived such a film:
"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," the new outrage from Miramax Pictures. What separates the ordinary flop from an atrocity like "Confessions?" A run-of-the-mill dud is hashed together, formulaic, and shallow; therefore light, minimally satisfying, and unpretentious. To truly torment, a film must be the opposite: slow, ruminating, self-serious. It must dispense with formula, and enter the 'experimental' realm from which plot, narrative, conflict, and drive are banished. It can't be artless; it must be 'important,' brainy, thick with literary quotations and poetic devices. Chuck Barris, creator of "The Gong Show "and "The Newlywed Game," really does claim to have been a C.I.A. assassin. He wrote a book to this effect. A skillful filmmaker might have turned that book into a small, funny, charmingly absurd picture. Instead, Clooney and Screenwriter Charles Kaufman twisted it into an abortive, operatic pseudo-tragedy. The character of Barris , played by Sam Rockwell, is totally without appeal, interest, or charisma.
The film examines him minutely from his sexually perverted youth until his burnt-out collapse as an accomplished mass killer, yet he never changes. Even his hairstyle stays the same. His loveless, interminable affair with a semi-retarded girl (Drew Barrymore, who should be fed hemlock for her performance) likewise drifts along, unaffected by any outside influence. Barris's dozens of sexual dalliances, like his dozens of murders, fall like pebbles into a dark well. What feelings he has come through mostly as grinding voiced-over monologues. The result is a muddy tableau: violent, yet not horrifying, pornographic, yet not sexy, vulgar, yet not human; both cerebral and stupid, both voluble and meaningless.
The only pleasures to be found here are in the loving recreations of TV's yesteryears. Breathes there a man with soul so dead as feels no nostalgia for the Unknown Comic, or the sound of Jamie Farr's mallet hitting The Gong? Yet if anything these flashes of lowbrow brilliance only increase our longing to escape the nightmare of "Confessions." Nothing resembles the levity of "The Newlywed Game" so little as watching Julia Roberts as a sophisticated assassin, holed up in an East Berlin hotel room with her guns, quoting Nabokov and mispronouncing his name.
You can't wring much sympathy out of seeing a bad movie. Sure, you blew a couple bucks, you wasted a couple hours. But it was just a movie, right? It's not as though you were in a prison camp. It's not like they shoved bamboo under your fingernails, or beat your shins with a rubber hose. Well, not usually. Bad movies are as common as houseflies, and in general not more distressing. But now and then comes alon something so traumatic, so brutally awful, that it can scarcely be called a movie at all. Last night we survived such a film:
"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," the new outrage from Miramax Pictures. What separates the ordinary flop from an atrocity like "Confessions?" A run-of-the-mill dud is hashed together, formulaic, and shallow; therefore light, minimally satisfying, and unpretentious. To truly torment, a film must be the opposite: slow, ruminating, self-serious. It must dispense with formula, and enter the 'experimental' realm from which plot, narrative, conflict, and drive are banished. It can't be artless; it must be 'important,' brainy, thick with literary quotations and poetic devices. Chuck Barris, creator of "The Gong Show "and "The Newlywed Game," really does claim to have been a C.I.A. assassin. He wrote a book to this effect. A skillful filmmaker might have turned that book into a small, funny, charmingly absurd picture. Instead, Clooney and Screenwriter Charles Kaufman twisted it into an abortive, operatic pseudo-tragedy. The character of Barris , played by Sam Rockwell, is totally without appeal, interest, or charisma.
The film examines him minutely from his sexually perverted youth until his burnt-out collapse as an accomplished mass killer, yet he never changes. Even his hairstyle stays the same. His loveless, interminable affair with a semi-retarded girl (Drew Barrymore, who should be fed hemlock for her performance) likewise drifts along, unaffected by any outside influence. Barris's dozens of sexual dalliances, like his dozens of murders, fall like pebbles into a dark well. What feelings he has come through mostly as grinding voiced-over monologues. The result is a muddy tableau: violent, yet not horrifying, pornographic, yet not sexy, vulgar, yet not human; both cerebral and stupid, both voluble and meaningless.
The only pleasures to be found here are in the loving recreations of TV's yesteryears. Breathes there a man with soul so dead as feels no nostalgia for the Unknown Comic, or the sound of Jamie Farr's mallet hitting The Gong? Yet if anything these flashes of lowbrow brilliance only increase our longing to escape the nightmare of "Confessions." Nothing resembles the levity of "The Newlywed Game" so little as watching Julia Roberts as a sophisticated assassin, holed up in an East Berlin hotel room with her guns, quoting Nabokov and mispronouncing his name.