The Majestic Review
by Karina Montgomery (cinerina AT flash DOT net)January 2nd, 2002
The Majestic
Matinee
I am either alone or way ahead of the curve by saying I really enjoyed this movie. Both Frank Darabont and Jim Carrey are wildly underappreciated in their given jobs, and they did admirable work together in this film, which I fear has slipped past most people unnoticed. Also, perhaps the merit for me alone is that I often wish for the chance that Carrey has in this film, to open a movie house and find a home and a place for myself that fits me, regardless of how I happened to fall into it.
The Majestic, and my response to it, reminds me of the first review I ever wrote, for Liar Liar, wherein I beseech people who have not given Jim Carrey a chance to see that film before denouncing him as a rubberfaced flash in the pan. Here, I ask the same Gentle Readers (and there are more of you than in March 1997) to give Jim another go. He has proven his dramatic chops in more than one drama or non-wacky comedy, but the public won't have it. They have been spoiled by casting directors who pigeonhole performers into being the same character over and over, and no one gives Jim a shake for branching out. Jimmy Stewart was permitted to play comedy and tragedy with equal aplomb, but not Carrey. His turn in Man On The Moon was insultingly ignored, and I fear that no matter what I say about The Majestic, it will remain a private pleasure, and Jim will languish in butt-cheek slapstick.
The story is timeless, as old as the Odyssey and The Return of Martin Guerre. If you can forget Sommersby ever happened, you can appreciate this lost man, newly lost in another man's shoes, finding himself at last. Aptly, Carrey's "real" identity is working in movies, a screenwriter, whose creativity is snuffed by the very people who demand it. The movie is about the power of truths, both real and imagined; it's about the power that movies have over people's lives, both those who work in movies, and the people who worship the silver screen. Add a splash of It's A Wonderful Life and Inherit The Wind and you have a film with the tone and earnestness of those bygone classics. It also has the accessibility of a movie that romanticizes an era ripe for romanticizing, and the hindsight to appreciate that world nearly 50 years after McCarthyism was in full force.
The Majestic is leisurely (my companions decried it as "nothing's happening") but I never felt a lack of activity. Much of it was in Carrey's mind, and on his face. Here is a man who writes words for people to create a false reality for a living, living among people whose power of hope and pretense has a completely different result. At times I was frustrated with some directions people's characters went in (I don't want to give anything away) but overall I was satisfied and I fully bought into the beauty that Darabont was selling me. And dammit, Jim Carrey can act, with his mind and his heart, and he's handsome and vulnerable and committed and it's just not right he should get such a short shrift.
I know I am not the only one (thanks for the support, J&M) but I hope you will go see it and see what I saw. I saw a movie about the subjectiveness of truth, and the importance of being true to principles over rote roles.
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