Simone Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)August 28th, 2002
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
SIMONE
Written and Directed by Andrew Niccol
Rated PG-13, 115 minutes
Hollywood filmmakers may be trying to tell us something. This is the second movie this year (after Woody Allen's "Hollywood Ending") in which an Oscar-winning director whose career is on the skids has to scramble to make a comeback. In Woody's, the director's ex-wife, who's a studio exec, pushes him for a picture, and we can tell she still loves him. Here, the director's ex-wife, who's a studio exec, fires him from a picture, although we can tell that she still loves him. In both cases, success is ultimately achieved by outlandish deception and artificial means that show up the shallowness and skewed values of the movie business, and the wives return to the fold.
"Simone" is the work of writer/director Andrew Niccol, who wrote the screenplay for "The Truman Show", and it's easy to see the kind of thoughts that occupy his working hours. Truman was a real person in a fake world. Simone is a fake person in the real world, if you can call Hollywood the real world. Niccol has serious issues about artificiality in the movie business. Pretty soon we can expect to see him taking the cinematic Vow of Chastity and joining the ranks of Dogma 95.
Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino) finds himself on a slippery slope to disaster when Nicola Anders (Winona Ryder), the temperamental leading lady of his latest movie, walks out in a snit over trailer size. Viktor's name is mud. No actress will work with him. The studio head, Elaine Christian (Catherine Keener), who is Viktor's ex, pulls the plug on the picture. "I can't believe I'm being fired by the mother of my child," he says incredulously.
To the rescue comes Hank Aleno (Elias Koteas), a dying mad scientist who's developed a computer program called Simulation One, which he claims can create an actor out of pixels and pop him or her into a movie without anyone being able to tell the difference. Viktor brushes him off, but Hank dies and wills the program to him, and Viktor creates a perfect ingénue out of elements of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and a smorgasbord of other immortals. He names her Simone (Sim/One), inserts her digitally into Nicola's scenes, and the picture and its mysterious star are a sensation.
Simone is the ideal actress. She never talks back, she gives exactly the performance the director wants from her, she has no qualms about doing nude scenes, no demands for special perks like trailers and limos, and in video interviews she always gives full and worshipful credit to Viktor for having made her what she is today.
Eventually, however, the pressure of keeping the secret grows intolerable. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Viktor has seen his creature grow into a monster he can no longer control. At one time he had intended to come clean about the gimmick, but Simone has become an international sensation, and the game has gone beyond the point where a simple "Sorry folks, just kidding" will do. But of course getting rid of Simone is no simple matter.
Niccol has chosen to make Viktor's movies campy pastiches of Antonioni-esque art films, with dialogue by Hallmark and titles like "Eternity Forever". There is no chance in the world, at least in this world, that these movies would become box office sensations, and Niccol is not successful in building us a world where we can accept that it could happen.
Al Pacino's penchant for going over the top serves this story well, and he manages some moments of nuance and comedy with a deft touch. Catherine Keener is always good, but she needs to talk to her agent about a different range of roles - she's finally made the breakthrough from Indie Queen to the big time, and she's in danger of getting swept straight through to the character actor's wing. Elias Koteas and Winona Ryder are entertaining in brief appearances, and Pruitt Taylor Vance makes the most of a sadly underwritten part as a dogged journalist. Simone is coyly identified in the credits as Simone, but in reality she's Canadian model Rachel Roberts, and she does well as the pixilated screen goddess.
"Simone" has such a sturdy collection of solid laughs that it almost seems churlish to have to testify that it's not a very satisfactory movie. But it's built on punch lines pounced on without the necessary buildup. The laughs are isolated, colorful islands in a stagnant stream. Niccol skips from one to the next on a jerrybuilt plot that never bothers about filling in gaping holes in logic and story. If this were a Marx Brothers picture, we wouldn't worry about gaps in logic and story. But this movie isn't zany enough, and its style begs for a lot more thought to caulk its leaky narrative. Like the title character herself, "Simone" is all concept, a surface illusion with no body or soul.
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