I like George Clooney.
Aside from the qualities which make up his star persona, there is an integrity and a willingness to experiment which always makes him interesting.
He became a star relatively late, and he is more interested in progressing his career through judicious choices - mid to low budgets, substantive subjects with real-life issues as the focus.
Aside from a few big budget ventures - Batman and Robin, Tomorrowland - he has stuck to that lane, and had some decent critical and commercial success.
Alongside his acting career, Clooney has also made the jump to directing his own projects.
His debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, came on the heels of Clooney’s purple patch, a clutch of movies which cemented his star status at the turn of the millennium, with Three Kings, The Perfect Storm and Ocean’s Eleven.
In the years since, Clooney has directed eight other films, and - as of this writing - has a new project in the offing.
It is safe to say that, in overview, the results of Clooney’s second career have been variable, but after two decades he has amassed a body of work which is all over the map, in terms of genre, style and success.
While I had not watched all of his films, I was intrigued by their variety and thought it would make for an interesting long-term project to watch them all.
Based on a script by Charlie Kaufman, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind sounds like a typical Clooney career decision:
Kaufman was the screenwriter of the moment off the success of Being John Malkovich, and so picking one of his other projects made sense. Kaufman also disowned the film after he was shut out of the production and other scribes were brought in for rewrites.
The finished film is an oddity. I cannot say it was enjoyable - despite the all-star cast and its various stylistic flourishes, the movie is kind of a bore.
Thankfully, the film hangs together thanks to the lead performance from Sam Rockwell as Barris.
It is a more character-focused performance, less concerned with crafting or establishing a star persona. Barris is not a sympathetic character, and Rockwell shows a willingness to lean into his sleazier side, showing the needy, flawed manchild behind the (fantasy) globe-trotting superspy.
Outside of his performance, the film is a collection of impressive aesthetic decisions - from changing filmstock, lighting and visual styles to signal different decades, to blending separate sets within the same frame, to frames of empty space.
The film is a prime example of a debut filmmaker anxious to try out as many visual tricks as possible.
Kudos to Clooney - with its shifting time periods, narrative perspectives and shaky sense of reality, Confessions is the right project in principle for this approach.
But at a certain point, I started to get frustrated with how busy the direction was - what is this in service of? What are we supposed to take from Barris’s descent into paranoia and depression?
And the tone is weirdly off - there are scenes and performances which feel aimed toward satire, but then there are other scenes where it feels like we are being ground into Barris’s deepest recesses. When it is meant to be funny, it is too sombre, and when it aims for pathos it is too cartoonish.
At the end of it all, I was getting the sneaking suspicion that the movie had no idea what it wanted to be about.
There is a cynical edge to the final coda, but it feels like an ellipsis rather than the exclamation point the film thinks it is.
An interesting albeit flawed debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is probably better taken as a piece in the careers of its writer and director than as a film in its own right.
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