The Majestic Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)December 25th, 2001
THE MAJESTIC
Rated PG, 150 minutes
Directed by Frank Darabont
WHERE, WHEN
Now playing at UA DeVargas
Poor Jim Carrey. Like the clown who yearns to play Hamlet, he keeps trying to climb the ladder of serious fare, only to wind up with yet another pie in his face. He’s a nice performer, but whatever acting chops he has apart from the rubber-faced mugging that catapulted him to stardom aren’t equal to the task of rescuing this appallingly contrived screenplay and manipulative mess of filmmaking.
Frank Darabont, the director of the very good “Shawshank Redemption” and that overpraised wallow “The Green Mile”, here comes apart at the seams, leaking schmaltz onto the screen in agreeable taffy-candy colors. Working from a script that feels as if it was written by a computer program, he tries to reconstruct the emotional landscape of a Frank Capra film and winds up with something that might be a pretty nifty parody of Caprian sentimentality if it weren’t an unconscionably pretentious two and a half hours long.
Peter Appleton (Carrey) is a B movie writer in ‘50s Hollywood, when he attracts the attention of the HUAC boys regarding his attendance at a Communist meeting in college some ten years before. Appleton had only gone to impress a girl he was trying to bed, but he winds up on the blacklist, and when he takes a drunken drive up the coast to flee his sorrows, he plunges off a bridge and washes up on a beach the next morning with a serious case of amnesia. The townspeople take him for Luke Trimble, one of their sons lost in the War, and, with no memories of his own to contradict them, he embraces their loving welcome. Luke’s father (Martin Landau, an intelligent actor who looks stunned by the script’s simplemindedness) is beside himself with joy, and decides to refurbish and reopen the old Majestic movie theater, which he had shut down after the war. Amazingly, after nine and a half years, the colorful old staff is still on the premises.
The world of “The Majestic” is life the way it would be if it were lived on a sound stage with hack writers providing the dialogue and music swelling in the background. When the filmmakers want to use a cliché (and when don’t they?) they don’t let anything stand in their way. Carrey, for instance, gets the old scene of the famished guy wolfing down a plate of eggs while onlookers smile tolerantly, but he leaves half the plate unfinished when they suggest he go see Old Doc for a checkup. Landau, who has been virtually speechless with joy at the return of his son, interrupts his beaming silence to say “But here’s me blatherin’ away like a fool….”
“The Majestic” has its heart in the right place when it works around to its timely denunciation of the HUAC witch hunt, and it does manage to work in a few good scenes, mostly around music (Carrey plays some nice roadhouse boogie on the piano.) But you’ll find yourself whispering the lines a few beats before the actors; and if you weep at the death scene (no, not Carrey’s) they will not be tears of woe. The movie begins with Appleton in a script conference suffering as studio cretins refashion his screenplay into treacly mush. The scene could have been shot at a script conference for “The Majestic.”
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
