Film: You Only Live Twice

Staying in tonight? Catching up on some quality trash TV? You're not alone. Thank Chuck Barris, the - those campy 60s and 70s primetime hits considered precursors to modern reality TV shows. Think Joe Millionaire and American Idol; they were the fun, but tacky big-network cash cows that Americans loved to hate. Barris was a pop-culture icon credited with revolutionizing network television, putting the boob in the tube and the idiot in the box. In his 1984 autobiography, Barris also claimed to have led a secret life as a CIA hit man, using his television persona as a front. His life story is the premise for George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Barris (Sam Rockwell) stalks pretty girls and chews with his mouth open. He's a graceless, awkward little guy who never does things quite right, gets lucky in spite of himself, but always manages to fumble. Enter George Clooney, CIA operative, with an offer too good to refuse - and probably too good to be true. Confessions never directly questions the validity of Barris' story, but nourishes a cinematic alter ego that's conspicuously out of sync with the rest of his life. His CIA shots are stylistically surreal and deliberately vague, almost as though - and here's the key - they represent what a dorky little guy like Barris, having seen one too many late-night B-list espionage thrillers, imagines government work to be.

George Clooney is the quintessential government top cop with a deadpan monotone and all the answers. Julia Roberts is a Bond-girl conglomerate of indeterminate purpose. There are missions; there are targets, and no one seems to really know what's going on - least of all, Barris. He doesn't know how to hold a gun. It's great.

But why? It's High Fidelity's John Cusack meets Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Man awakens desire for a creative legacy, said creation spins out of control. Barris didn't set out to be the king of trash TV, and I think he created the CIA story for himself, not for an audience, to balance the cheap publicity of his television persona with a darker heroism.

He's a common man of uncommon ambition, who only manages to distinguish himself by glorifying things common and mundane. Barris's CIA alter ego isn't intended to be a cold-blooded contract killer, but a thankless servant of the country whose audience tarnished his dream. "I dispose of people," he says, "and I am disposable." Barris is two men - the visionary he thought himself to be and the man he's become - divided by the warped progeny of an imagination betrayed.

Confessions defies the one sentence wrap-up; the film's too slick to have an obvious point. But if one person walks out of that theater intrigued, confused and a little bit bored - maybe wishing he'd gone to see The Hot Chick instead - I think Barris is finally having a well-deserved last laugh.