The Majestic Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)December 17th, 2001
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Frank Darabont made a name for himself writing and directing The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, two brilliant and beloved adaptations of Stephen King prison stories that netted him three Oscar nominations (two for writing, one for producing). With The Majestic, Darabont jettisons King, the prison setting and, worst of all, himself as a screenwriter. As a result, the film drastically pales in comparison to its two predecessors (it's about a half-hour shorter than Mile but seems twice as long).
Jim Carrey (The Grinch) plays Peter Appleton, a Hollywood screenwriter who is living the life of kings in 1951. His first film, Sand Pirates of the Sahara, is about to be released, he's dating a hot actress (Laurie Holden, The X-Files), and he's due for a big raise from the studio that bankrolls him. But something comes out of left field to smack Peter back down to earth - Commie hunters. It turns out he unknowingly attended a Communist meeting in college, and, as a result, he's called to testify before Congress, dumped by the skirt, and released from his studio contract.
After spending some quality time at the bar, Peter decides to drive up the coast but gets into an accident where he takes a blow to the head and ends up in a storm-swelled river. Before you know it, he washes up on the shore-o of Lawson, a tiny town with an unusually high number of WWII casualties. Because of the head injury, Peter doesn't know who he is or where he came from, but - miracle of all miracles - he's the spitting image of one of Lawson's soldiers who has been missing for nine and a half years and is presumed dead.
Peter assumes the life of one Luke Trimble, the son of Lawson's movie palace owner (Martin Landau, Ready to Rumble) and fiancée of aspiring law student Sandra Sinclair (Amanda Detmer, Saving Silverman). At first, he has a hard time adjusting to his new surroundings, but he eventually warms to his new identity. And why wouldn't he? Sandra is hot and the whole town loves him in a recklessly blind kind of way. Lawson is a place that needed a miracle so badly, they never bother to ask where the hell Luke has been for the last decade.
The Majestic is the kind of film you should see with somebody like O.J. Simpson, because odds are you're going to feel like choking the shit out of somebody as you're watching it. It has plenty of opportunities to end but insists on bypassing each one of them. There's really only two ways the film can finish (neither very thrilling or surprising), but Darabont still takes forever to get there. The finale is a flag-waving First Amendment rally speech that seems more out of place than Bryant Gumbel at a Snoop Dogg concert.
The film's script was written by Michael Sloane, whose biggest credits to date are for acting (you may remember him in such films as Teen Lust and Scanner Cop II, where he dazzled us all with his performance as "Wild Inmate"). It's best parts are - no joke - two scenes that feature the voices of Sydney Pollack, Garry Marshall and Reiners Rob and Carl, who play studio bosses intent on changing Peter's scripts. Carrey, who shows he's only tolerable in dramas with decent scripts (like Andrew Niccol's The Truman Show) or meaty biopics (Man on the Moon), does an admirable job, but most people will be silently praying for him to start talking with his ass as The Majestic approaches the two-hour mark.
2:46 - PG for language and mild thematic elements
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