The new Al Pacino Hollywood satire, "Simone," has some very good points to make. Then, because they are so good, it makes them again. Then, because it's afraid we'll forget them, it makes them again. And finally, because it has nothing else to do, it makes them again.
So you don't so much admire the movie as feel bludgeoned by its attitudes, however commendable they may be. Yes, of course, the current way of making movies is absurd. Yes, certainly, too many big stars are pampered poseurs and insecure twits. Yes, of course, technology, which seems to offer so many answers, may well end up raising even more and even harder questions. Yes, yes, the media are all idiots.
Al Pacino stars in "Simone."
(New Line Cinema)
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Pacino plays a big-budget director named Viktor Taransky, down on his luck, who has been abandoned in mid-production by an immature twerp of a star played with narcissistic gusto by Winona Ryder. The studio – it's called, as is customary in these situations, "Amalgamated Pictures," but that's the Paramount lot or I'm a 365-pound ballerina – wants to suspend production and close down his contract. All this is handled very nicey-nicey by the studio boss, Elaine Christian (Catherine Keener), who happens to be Viktor's ex-wife and the mother of their adorable daughter.
At that moment of professional despair, who should accost Viktor but a madman-genius-visionary. With perfect timing, Hank (over-intense Elias Koteas, in an unbilled part) offers Viktor a promise of the future, followed by the future itself. Then, again with perfect timing, he dies. The future comes contained in an advanced computer disk which contains Simulation One, i.e., Sim One, i. again e., "Simone."
Simone is a virtual actress: She can be coded digitally into any film, her facial muscles manipulated subtly, her eyes made to dilate, squinch, widen, display horror, love, loyalty, madcap abandon or Holly Golightly's ethereality. Her voice can be blended, smoothed, hardened, tilted, scrunched, all with a touch of the button. She's talented, obedient, beautiful, no-maintenance, doesn't smoke, only needs a Winnebago the size of a man's hip pocket. She is, in short, the compleat pixel pixie, and a director's dream of an actress. Secretly, Viktor inserts her in the movie he was working on, titled "Sunrise, Sunset," and yes: She becomes a star, it becomes a hit and Viktor becomes a genius.
A number of things help sustain this frail reed of a story. One is that Pacino, of late overbearing and sometimes genuinely out of control, dials his performance way down. He interacts much more believably with his co-stars, and the relationship with Keener is nicely detailed, though it carries odd, and I presume coincidental, echoes of the attraction between Woody Allen and Tea Leoni in "Hollywood Ending," another movie-about-movies with the subplot of an aging director trying to lure his film-exec wife back into a relationship.
Another nice thing about the film is the supermodel Rachel Roberts as Simone. For some reason the movie plays coy with the information that it's a real woman behind the stylizations ("and Simone as Herself" reads the credits), and it's helpful that Roberts's face is unreal: It is beautiful beyond flaw and it also seems like a computer morphing of real gals Angelina Jolie (those lips!) and Charlize Theron (those eyes!). But Roberts appears to be the rare Hasselblad object who is capable of projecting genuine emotion onto the perfect geometry of her face.
And it's pretty funny, at least for a while. Ryder's tantrum because her huge trailer is two inches shorter than her co-star's is funny, as is the wiggy intensity with which she throws herself into it. And "Simone" has a good time with the institutional fibbing of film culture, by which countless ambitious no-talents tell Viktor that they saw the nonexistent Simone last night and that she wants them in the new picture.
But almost too soon, the movie loses contact with credibility. It seems to take place in a world where no one has heard of digitized film processing (was it written in a pre-mouse age, 10 years ago, when this stuff was new?). And once reality is left behind, each plot twist trumps its predecessor into ludicrousness.
Simone takes on a life of her own, and soon Viktor, though secretly her controller, is unimportant. He tries to destroy her publicly, but her politically incorrect stances ("I think every school should have a shooting range") only make her more popular, rather than less. Soon, after he's zapped her disk and dumped the computer gear into the drink, he's on trial for murder.
Worse, certain key details just never play realistically enough to convince us of the illusion. Viktor is a computer moron, yet, in the secrecy of his soundstage, he's able to manipulate the program well enough to essentially hoodwink the entire world? And in a celebrity-mad sleazoid media world, Simone's lack of actual human presence is never suspected? Hard to accept.
But the worst part of the film is its length. On and on it goes, as if the director, Andrew Niccol (who also wrote the screenplay), thinks his three points are so important that they are worth making nine times. Six would have been enough. By the time the last cycle rolls around, your rear end is needling you for release from bondage.
SIMONE (PG-13, 122 minutes) – Contains sexual innuendo. At area theaters.
