I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

This is my third bi-monthly revisitation of the films of Charlie Kaufman in 2021.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is the Charlie Kaufman film I always forget about. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't think of it as a Kaufman film at the time, though I probably would have not yet fully developed my definition of a "Charlie Kaufman film" in 2002, so I suspect I sort of forget about it in retrospect. And it's easy to do so because I've never felt the desire to revisit it.

After a second viewing, I can say almost certainly that there will never be a third.

I don't dislike this movie, but it doesn't do a lot for me, to be honest. I remember being puzzled, back in 2002, about which parts of it were real and which parts were not. That wouldn't be a problem for me today, as I appreciate a lot more the creative license that might be taken with the lives of real people. I mean, this is a post Inglourious Basterds and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter world. But back then, it stuck in my craw and never dislodged.

I think I knew any material related to Chuck Barris being a spy was not real, as the whole idea for the movie came from Barris' autobiography, in which he claimed he had been a spy. (If he did work for the CIA, I seriously doubt it was in the form of assassinating people.) He later admitted it was made up, but then subsequent comments suggested a caginess about the whole thing, like if he had been a spy of course he would have had to say he hadn't been. Whatever. He wasn't.

But the parts I struggled with -- that's perhaps an exaggerated way to describe it -- were the events depicted on the game shows he was involved with, such as The Dating Game. There's a sequence in this film where contestants on the show give increasingly vulgar answers to questions, those that definitely would have violated censorship laws, and I remember that it troubled me, in 2002, to try to figure out if these things had actually happened. I now understand it as Kaufman's exaggeration of an underlying truth about the show -- that it fed people's more prurient natures -- and I "struggle" with it less now.

I think some of the things I don't love about Confessions are the things George Clooney brings to it as director. Although the period design is generally done well, Clooney tries to augment that with the use of various filters that I just find distracting. I also think the entire existence of Julia Roberts' character (and to a lesser extent, Clooney's own character) places this too much in an Ocean's Eleven world, a world that does not seem to speak particularly to Kaufman's sensibilities. We also know that Clooney has gotten significant influences from Joel and Ethan Coen, and while they have made some of my favorite films of all time, I don't think them particularly to be a match for Kaufman either. (Though it's closer.) I think specifically of the scene where Chuck's CIA compatriot strangles a cross country skier in Europe, and you can see the man's skis flailing about, sticking out of the back seat of the car, as he expires. That's such a Coen moment. 

But to say this film is absent the themes of Kaufman's work would be dead wrong. Again, they are all over the place here.

While Barris himself is not a close match for a typical Kaufman hero -- he's got a lot more confidence, for starters -- the way Sam Rockwell looks at certain points of this movie are Kaufman all over. At certain junctures he sports a kind of Kaufman afro that make him a dead ringer for the writer and future director. And since a lot of Kaufman's work involves fantasizing about being a different, more capable version of himself, Barris fits that description to a T. Barris' whole story is a fantasy that has come from a screenwriter's mind, even if that fantasy was inspired by a fantasy that came from Barris' own mind. (In my notes I also noted that Rockwell looked, at certain parts, a bit like Nicolas Cage -- which is appropriate since Cage plays Kaufman in July's film, Adaptation, which was released contemporaneously with Confessions.) It seems appropriate, though undoubtedly coincidental, that both Barris and Kaufman have the same first name, "Chuck" and "Charlie" both being nicknames for Charles.

Then the actual narrative structure is familiar from Kaufman's work, as it uses two strategies he used in Human Nature: a recurring interview format, as well as narration from at least one of the characters. Clooney chooses to make those interviews in a more explicitly documentary style format than they were in Human Nature, in part to lead us up to an actual "interview" with the real-world Barris at the end. 

Then there are some of the recognizable Kaufman thematic concerns, which are probably almost worth just bullet-pointing:

- There's a line of dialogue about Chuck being raised as a girl. As we saw in Being John Malkovich and will see later in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Kaufman is interested in characters who cross the gender divide.

- Drew Barrymore's Penny tells Chuck of a dream she had where she was talking to an ape. Again, this seems to be bleeding through from Human Nature.

- Penny also gives Chuck a reason why he likes her, which is that she's "nothing like your mother." Chuck responds angrily to this and wonders where it was coming from. Again we see Kaufman grappling with mother issues. That character otherwise does not appear in the story, so it's out-of-nowhere reference is significant in terms of his obvious preoccupation.

- Then the coup de grace: "I hate myself," Chuck says at one point. "Goddamn do I hate myself."

In July I will watch both of Kaufman's next two films, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which are also his best two films. Since I've seen both at least four times, I figure I'll have less new to say about each, and can cram in them both, in order to keep us on track for Synecdoche, New York in September and Anomalisa in November to close the series.