Having given us The Shawshank Redemption in 1994 and The Green Milefive years later, director Frank Darabont finally busts out of prison with his third feature, The Majestic (which, incidentally, has the worst ad art since Green Mile). Working from a script by Michael Sloane -- no Stephen King connection this time -- Darabont admittedly is trying for a Frank Capra effect. Indeed, the best that can be said about The Majestic is that it may boost Capra's reputation by virtue of comparison. Apparently, it's not so easy to weave that kind of magic.
"Look on the bright side, dear: At least you've forgotten that Oscar snub for The Truman Show."
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Rated PG
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Jim Carrey stars as Peter Appleton, a young Hollywood screenwriter, circa 1951, whose career is just beginning to heat up. He's got a flashy new Mercedes and an even flashier girlfriend (Amanda Detmer). But his whole life suddenly derails when a congressional panel of Commie-busters fingers him as a subversive: While trying to put the moves on some coed back in his college days, he accompanied her to some meetings of the "Bread Instead of Bullets" Club. Peter is no hero: He's all too willing to testify, to name names (if he can make any up), to be a show pony for the committee. But while driving up the coast to unwind, he encounters a storm and skids off a bridge. When he awakens on a beach near a little town called Lawson, he's got a bump on his head, no identification, and a nice case of amnesia.
At first, everyone in Lawson who meets him -- the old codger (James Whitmore) who finds him, the town doctor (David Ogden Stiers), the sheriff (Brent Briscoe) -- thinks he seems vaguely familiar. Their uncertainty makes no sense in retrospect: He is, in fact, a dead ringer for Luke Trimble, who went missing during World War II some ten years earlier.
Peter doesn't think he's Luke, but not having any other identity to cling to, he allows himself to become Luke -- particularly since the job includes a loving father (Martin Landau), a gorgeous fiancée (Laurie Holden), a Congressional Medal of Honor, and the admiration of the whole town. Luke's amazing resurrection energizes the town: Without his real personality to fall back on, Peter quickly grows to match the role he's been assigned. He helps his "dad" reopen their old movie theater (from which the film takes its title); he provides a sense of hope to all the other parents who lost sons in the war; he becomes the agent of healing.
If that sounds cloying, it is. Even the belated arrival of some sort of real threat -- the committee, assuming that his disappearance is a sign of guilt, has detectives hot on Peter's trail -- doesn't do much to cut through the gallons of treacle that Darabont has poured on the project.
Sloane seems to have been inspired primarily by Robert Riskin's brilliant script for Capra's Meet John Doe, with infusions from other classic Capra films, as well as Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero! It may not be surprising that Darabont and Sloane have none of Sturges's edge; after all, how many writers or directors do? But they don't even muster Capra's edge. If the old master's films have for years been glibly derided as "Capra corn," The Majestic is all corn and little Capra.
It's only part of the problem that Lawson is constantly shot in a lovely, surreal glow and that there exists no racial bias or poverty or jealousy or damned near any emotions beyond friendliness and postwar grieving. Darabont is, to put it mildly, a leisurely storyteller, and this trifle weighs in at more than two and a half hours (a half hour shorter than Green Mile). Length shouldn't be a criterion in and of itself, but there's no doubt the film's pacing is pokey.
Carrey has long since proved himself a versatile actor, not just a rubber-faced clown, but he doesn't fill the shoes of either James Stewart or Gary Cooper here; the problem is less a matter of acting chops than of physical presence. And the entire cast is forced to deliver some howlers that would have seemed clichéd 50 years ago. Even the protagonist's big speech at the end, the payoff for the entire film, fails to inspire. And it's doubly a shame because the sentiments it expresses about liberties are more relevant in these John Ashcroft days than Darabont or Sloane could possibly have anticipated.
