NO MATTER how closely you imitate Frank Capra, no one does Capra better than, well, Capra. This no-brainer of a truism rings loud and clear throughout "The Majestic," Frank Darabont's cardboard-Capraesque fable about a blacklisted screenwriter (Jim Carrey) who loses his memory.
If the neo-sentimental movie's good for anything, it's to prove there's more to Carrey than wild-eyed comedy. He can act. But in this movie's extremely derivative scheme of things, he comes across practically as a hologram, a Capraesque replicant. Not an actual, huggable, squeezable character.
Laurie Holden and Jim Carrey star in "The Majestic."
(Warner Brothers)
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In the early 1950s, Peter Appleton (Carrey) is an ambitious screenwriter at a Hollywood studio, whose first script, "Sand Pirates of the Sahara," has just opened on a double bill with "The African Queen." But, on the verge of success, Peter runs afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee. His long-ago association with a student communist group has caught up with him; his studio drops him immediately.
Distraught, Peter takes a drive down the coast. It's raining. His car runs off a bridge into a river. Bonk! goes his head against one of the bridge's pillars. And in one of those "Robinson Crusoe" transitions, he finds himself washed up on the beach of a nearby small town. He can't remember a thing about himself.
Peter is adopted quickly by the locals, who almost immediately take him for Luke, a long lost son who has been missing since World War II. Luke's father, Harry (Martin Landau), seems to have little problem buying into this belief. And Luke's girlfriend, Adele (Laurie Holden), isn't far behind.
Does everyone really believe Peter is Luke? Peter, who doesn't know the difference, certainly goes along for the ride. And before he knows it, he's rebuilding the Majestic, the movie theater that Harry has left to languish over the years, falling deeply in love with Adele and living Luke's life.
Darabont and screenwriter Michael Sloane's misty-eyed tribute may be pleasant in places, but it's too manufactured and deliberate to be persuasive. The townspeople are so one-dimensionally archetypal that you wonder if their lack of believability is a deliberate ploy. Maybe they're part of Peter's dream. Darabont, after all, made "The Shawshank Redemption," which traded hugely on a twisteroo conclusion. But there's no such device here. And it's obvious from the get-go that those un-American folks will be back in the picture; that Peter's memory will be jogged; and that all those nice small-town folks are going to be disappointed. Everything is so inevitable, in fact, that there's hardly any point in watching this, except to cultivate an appreciation for the older, better works of Frank Capra.
THE MAJESTIC (PG, 149 minutes) – Contains nothing particularly objectionable. Area theaters.
