Melvin Van Peebles has been well-established as a maverick independent filmmaker and provocateur since at least 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song. His new film, Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha, confirms that he's also still got a way with titles. He also still has an admirable willingness to make a public jackass of himself and an impressive ability to coax other people into coming along for the ride. Aside from that, though, there isn't a lot else to say about this smeared-looking video fantasy, spun off from one of his old stage shows, Waltz of the Stork. There might have been a few things that should have been said to Van Peebles before he made it, but I don't know who would have been deputized to say them. When the man's own son, Mario, has signed off for a cameo appearance as a pirate, it's hard to say who might have been best qualified to stage an intervention.
Confessions makes full use of the quality that has always been Van Peebles's secret weapon and that has outweighted everything else he's ever brought to the table, which is his absolute and fearless shamelessness. The seventy-five-year-old auteur plays the vagabond hero from the time he's fourteen through his mid-forties. This conceit might have been fun if Van Peebles were an actor, but he's usually gotten by on being a presence, and aside from the occasional outbreak of eye-popping, face-pulling hamminess, he doesn't have any idea what to do with himself here except stand around looking slack, sad-eyed, and grizzled. (As for costuming, Van Peebles tends to favor either one of two looks, the funeral director and the rodeo clown.) It's less amusing that embarrassing to watch him stealing apples as if he were in an Our Gang comedy or acting out his character's sexual initiation and confirming that, however long ago Sweetback was, once a stud, always a stud. (Yes, there are sex scenes. Yes, you do get to see Melvin with his shirt off and snuggling with the ladies, though a body double arrives in the nick of time when things get steamy. And no, none of this is as bad as the scene with the apple: Van Peebles has to be one of the movies' least photogenic eaters this side of Mr. Creosote.) I understand that Van Peebles is so taken with himself and his legend that he thinks the last thing in the world he needs is some distance and perspective in relation to himself, but the fact remains that Mario Van Peebles's swaggering performance as his dad in his own movie BAADASSSSS! from a few years back was both the best work Mario's ever done in movies and the smartest performance ever given by someone purporting to play Melvin Van Peebles. It is indeed a tribute to Melvin Van Peebles's spirit that, at seventy-five, he's still getting movies made and trying to use them to raise hell. But anyone who cares about him ought to pay him the soundest tribute they can by pretending that his latest movie doesn't exist.