Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Blu-ray Movie Review

Was he or wasn't he?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 30, 2011

Anyone who ever caught The Gong Show during its original broadcast (network and syndication) days no doubt thought one thing about creator-host Chuck Barris: there was something seriously off about this guy. Twitching, manic, bizarre: these are just three adjectives which immediately spring to mind in attempting to describe the diminutive but incredibly energetic man who also brought us such “classics” as The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The $1.98 Beauty Pageant and, in a desperate (and unsuccessful) attempt to earn a little respectability, the short-lived USO-esque series of variety performances before (stateside) troops, Operation: Entertainment. Was Barris something of a Renaissance Man? Well, that largely depends on how liberal your definition of Renaissance Man is. Barris certainly remade the daytime game show in his own image in the sixties and seventies (and, due to reboots and syndication, well beyond). He also wrote a Top 5 rock and roll hit for Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon in 1962 called “Palisades Park,” an homage to a New Jersey amusement emporium, replete with interpolated sounds of screams and machinery on a roller coaster. And if one is to believe Barris’ autobiography, this twentieth century reincarnation of a carnival huckster was also a paid CIA assassin, one who utilized the “grand prize” vacation giveaways on The Dating Game to accompany the winners as a putative chaperone, but who was in reality dispatching with any number of foreign agents and other nasty people. Probably best remembered by the public at large due to his hosting duties on The Gong Show, a series which seemed to cram every cringe-worthy audition from American Idol into a daily thirty minute extravaganza of collective schadenfreude, where both the live in studio audience and those gathered around their clunky seventies television sets could laugh disparagingly at the sad spectacle of untalented misfits desperately grasping for their fifteen minutes of fame. But was there a secret, almost perfectly hidden, side to Barris during all of this nonsense?

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman exploits the dialectic between reality and illusion better than perhaps any other contemporary writer currently working in film. With such astoundingly original works as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman explores the very fabric of filmmaking itself within his creations, literally the art of illusion. While that exploration may not in fact be the actual focal point of any of his pieces, the subtext is there for anyone wanting to poke and prod around enough to find it. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Kaufman is working with a subject who was in every sense self-created, and he utilizes that aspect of Barris’ character in sometimes alarmingly brilliant ways. This is a screenplay which literally dances with events, utilizing filmic tropes like pans and dollies to effortlessly create segues of new timelines, situations and locales. Are we seeing events that actually happened, or simply the fertile quasi-hallucinations of Barris’ febrile imagination? That is left up to the viewer, but Kaufman and first time director George Clooney up the ante considerably by including little snippets of actual real-life personages like Dick Clark, Jaye P. Morgan and Jim Lange to comment on the film’s events and Barris in general. What indeed is reality and what is illusion?

With a leading character as audacious as Barris, an equally audacious approach needs to be taken with the film, and the good news is that George Clooney pretty much pulls out all of the stops here in what was his first directorial assignment. Without lapsing into Barris-esque hyperbole, it’s hard to think of a more technically assured directorial debut, especially one that uses so many bells and whistles (and some might argue gimmicks), unless one were to go back to Orson Welles’ stunning helming entrance with Citizen Kane. While Confessions of a Dangerous Mind certainly has none of the narrative brilliance or intrinsic genius of Kane, from a directorial standpoint the film is astonishingly well crafted and ingeniously planned. The thin line separating Barris’ “real life” (if hosting The Gong Show can even be termed real) and what is or perhaps isn’t a potent fantasy life is essayed deliberately and carefully, so that the viewer is never at a loss as to what’s going on, at least within the context of the film if not in the context of Barris’ ravaged psyche.

This is a film stuffed to the brim with star cameos, including Clooney himself as the CIA operative who supposedly recruits Barris, Julia Roberts as a sort of modern Mata Hari and Drew Barrymore as the free love hippified chick with whom Barris carries on an on again, off again affair but with whom he finds it hard to actually permanently connect. But the core of this film is the riveting lead performance of Sam Rockwell. Rockwell inhabits this role with particular élan, not just evoking the physical mannerisms and voice of Barris, but somehow seeming the excavate the rampant self-loathing that evidently is part and parcel of Barris’ and which his Confessions either intentionally or unintentionally revealed for all to see. In other words, it really doesn’t matter whether or not Barris is telling the truth about being a CIA assassin, as either way he reveals himself to be a despicable character. It’s fascinating that that focal personality corruption is so blithely and even entertainingly handled by Kaufman and Clooney here. It almost becomes irrelevant therefore that Barris was derided as having helped bring about a precipitous decline in Western civilization due to his smarmy television offerings. What difference does a Gong Show make when you’re actually (or supposedly) killing people in Helsinki?

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. I frankly never saw the film during its relatively brief theatrical run, but this Blu-ray is an astounding, if often very odd, amalgamation of filters, pushed contrast and other post processing that may leave some viewers wondering if their Blu-ray player or HDTV has gone irreversibly wonky. From the first "real life" snippet of Dick Clark, filmed on infrared film, filtered to the extreme purple end of the spectrum and pushed almost to posterizing levels of contrast, Clooney and his DP Newton Thomas Sigel let the viewer know right off the bat that they are not going to be seeing a "real life" biography with anything approaching accurate imagery. Over and over throughout the film, colors are pushed to the extremes, so that reds bloom lusciously (look at those heavily lipsticked women in the NBC page sequence for a good example), light seems to emanate from people like errant auras, and colors are often skewed almost irrationally. All of this said, the Blu-ray offers some really staggering fine detail. Look at an early close-up of Rockwell as Barris, a close-up so finely detailed that the tiniest hairs between his eyebrow and his eyelid can easily be seen despite the relatively dark lighting of the scene. Colors are incredibly robust throughout this enterprise, even if they're virtually never "accurate," at least in terms of ostensible real life. Oddly (and ironically) Clooney and Sigel tend to frame the most "real" looking sequences in terms of the game show recreations, obviously a subtle commentary yet again on the nature of reality versus illusion.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is presented with a surprisingly spry lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that has some wonderfully inventive elements of immersion. Clooney has as much fun supplying an active soundfield as he does in creating seamless segues between segments in the film. With all of the nonstop camera panning and dollying, we get a sometimes dizzying array of discrete channelization with a nice glut of foley effects and ambient environmental noise. The surrounds are utilized consistently if not overtly showily a lot of the time, in such great sequences as the establishment of Barris' page career at NBC or, later, in a smoky nightclub where he first meets up with his agent contact, portrayed by Julia Roberts. The film also boasts some surprising uses of LFE with some well placed gunshots (albeit frequently with silencers) that make this a kind of unusual "biographical" film. Fidelity is very strong throughout Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, with excellent dynamic range.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director George Clooney and Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel. This is an appealing and informative commentary. Clooney and Sigel talk at length about some of the techniques they used, like shooting all the interview segments on infrared film, as well as the in camera special effects. Clooney has a tendency to get into the "wow, this was fun to shoot" kind of comment quite a bit, but between the two men, there's a decent amount of information imparted and it's clear how deliberate so many of the choices were in crafting such an unusual looking film. It's interesting to hear Clooney compare Barris' character to the leading men in Alfie and Carnal Knowledge.
• Behind the Scenes (SD; 22:52) offers Clooney and the stars offering thoughts on "was he or wasn't he?" themselves, interspersed with the usual assortment of film clips and scenes being shot. There's an interesting segment on how all of the FX were actually practical, done in camera without the aid of digital post or other gimmicks.
• Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary by Clooney and Sigel (SD; 23:00) has some very interesting material, including lots of additional scenes with Rockwell, with Clooney and Sigel offering condolences for having had to cut so much material. Keep an eye out for Wonder Years' Fred Savage.
• Sam Rockwell Screen Tests (SD; 7:11)
• Gong Show Acts (SD; 4:53) is an assortment of recreated acts, some of which don't make it into the final film.
• The Real Chuck Barris (SD; 6:15) is a fun, if way too brief, look at the real man, with a few brief comments from Barris himself. There are a couple of other extended interview segments with others included, edited versions of which end up in the final film.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It ultimately doesn't matter if Barris is full of shinola or not with regard to his claims of having been a CIA assassin, and Clooney is on record as stating he wanted to come down firmly in the middle of the controversy so that any given viewer wouldn't know what exactly to believe. (It's interesting to note Clooney cites several test audiences who came back virtually 50-50 in terms of what side of the controversy they came down on). Confessions of a Dangerous Mind may not have the narrative genius of some of Charlie Kaufman's other work, but it often comes close, and Clooney displays a more than sure hand at directing, in fact an audacious and brilliant one that, yes, is showy and full of technique, but which supports the story and the storytelling. Performances here are top notch, and the film is just plain weird and an awful lot of fun, much like Barris himself. Highly recommended.