January 22, 2003

IT MAY BE hard to believe now, given the likes of Temptation Island and American Idol, but Chuck Barris was once considered public enemy number one in the perceived decline of American civilization. His network shows The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game introduced sexual innuendo to a form that lacked titillation. His syndicated $1.98 Beauty Show and, mostly famously, The Gong Show introduced the idea of humiliating ordinary, if clueless, citizens for national broadcast fun, as their "talents" were assessed by such Me Decade tastemakers like Jaye P. Morgan, Jamie "M*A*S*H's Klinger" Farr, Rex Reed, Arte Johnson, and Dr. Joyce Brothers. Let's face it: The man saw our mass-media future. Or he preordained it. In any case, the bar, once lowered, stayed very low indeed. Thanks Chuck!

Harder to believe still: George Clooney has made a remarkable film from Barris's ambiguously autobiographical memoir. Yes, that George Clooney, as a director. And his first such effort is a breathtakingly original one.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is not perfect. But it's the most avant-garde piece of cinema to come out of Hollywood in 2002 (it started screening late last year), as well as the most unpredictably entertaining. Who knew Clooney had this in him? Why were we not informed? How can any actor possibly keep a secret this big?

Barris's original tome is demented, incoherent, and enjoyable. Being John Malkovich scribe Charlie Kaufman does an even more impressive translative job here than he did with the semiforced Adaptation, hewing the book's raw material into an antic, surreal, yet never condescending portrait of pop mentalism from the inside out. But it's Clooney's ability to sew that conceptual patchwork into a Magic Finger-ous cinematic quilt that's most startling here. From start to finish, Confessions is masterfully off-kilter, from its elaborately thought-out visual schemata (digitally heightened pastel hell) and clever soundtrack choices (pop-dreck Muzak-cum-disco) to deadpan usage of cameo stars like Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.

This movie does sag a bit in its last act, as Barris (played by hitherto undervalued Bay Area alumnus Sam Rockwell, of treasured Lawn Dogs and Safe Men memory, not to mention his Charlie's Angels villainy) gets shaggy and paranoid to somewhat excess reel length. Nor is nominal female lead Drew Barrymore, as Barris's life love, fully up to the task. The latest descendant from America's preeminent theatrical family, Barrymore remains perversely amateur – her appeal rests on a good-sport persona that's almost antiprofessional. She can't "age" or vary performance tenor to save her life. Still, her up-for-whatever air is rewarded by one ideal, perhaps career-defining grace note: an exultant Stevie Nicks swirl-dance backgrounding one of Barris's many urgent phone calls.

Clooney is good as Barris's trench-coated boss in various cold war spy assignments, and Julia Roberts is good enough as the recurrent sexy iron curtain contact. (Will Roberts ever be better than "good"? Let's just thank Steven Soderbergh she's even gotten this adequate.) But the boldest impressions outside Rockwell's are made by such far-flung cast recruits as Rutger Hauer, Fred Savage, James Urbaniak, and original "Unknown Comic" Murray Langston – a Gong Show-worthy scroll of eccentrics.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is as tweaked as its spastic-comedian subject, as post-whatever as the latest wave of irony could manage. It's a dazzlingly private work of imagination – one I would never have anticipated from the erstwhile star of Ocean's 11, a bummer Batman, or even Solaris (which highlighted his butt almost as much as this does Sam Rockwell's). Then again, Clooney is also the fatally handsome veteran of abstract actioner Three Kings, South Park voice-guesting, several humbling sitcoms (plus, of course, ER), B cheesies Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Grizzy II: The Predator, and Return to Horror High. Not to mention the progeny of a TV newscaster dad and Tin Pan Alley singer auntie. Who could possibly come through all that with a sense of humor intact, let alone a refined sense of auteurist pacing, as well as compositional and postmodernist rigor?

George, we hardly knew ye. You're the biggest cultural surprise of the (past) year: a hunk with a mushroom head, it turns out. Now don't be stingy, baby. Let that unanticipated brilliance run wild – away from Perfect Storm Part II and into the brave new world of whatever project strikes you. Hollywood quakes before your box-office might, and the art form hopes you'll be as reckless as possible with it.