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The Majestic: Jim Carrey
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Amnesia ploy aside, the biggest problem with The Majestic is Darabont’s choice to relegate “The Majestic” itself to a mere subplot in a larger picture. Rather than bringing the revitalization of a town, the renovation of its theater, and the magic of that experience to the fore, Darabont instead homes in on themes of twisted fates, confused identities, and Communist accusations. Sadly, unlike the much more interesting revitalization subplot, we’ve seen all of this before (most recently in Carrey's own The Truman Show).
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"The Majestic" opens in Hollywood in 1951, a time when McCarthyism was at an all-time high, and no one, not even the Hollywood elite, was safe from the Communist witch hunt that was sweeping the country. Carrey plays B-movie screenwriter Peter Appleton, whose dreams of becoming an A-list writer are dashed after being named by the House of Un-American Activities Committee as a subversive. Dumped by both the studio and his movie starlet girlfriend (Amanda Detmer of "Saving Silverman"), Appleton drinks himself into a stupor and subsequently drives his car off a bridge while heading up the California coast.
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Set in 1951, The Majestic stars Jim Carrey as Peter Appleton, a blacklisted actor struck by a mishap, endlessly seen in its trailers, that erases his memory. As so many amnesiacs before him, Carrey wanders around aimlessly until someone tells him who he is. Unfortunately, that someone mistakes him for his son, dead seven years, a brutal casualty of WWII. Even more coincidentally, Peter looks exactly like the long-dead hero Luke Trimble, and soon the entire town, having lost nearly all it’s young men to the war believes as well, rallying around Luke and his re-opening of their local movie theater “The Majestic” as a source of rejuvenation.
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The Majestic is, alas, overburdened by the dead weight of its own dim-witted aspirations and leaden narrative. It is mawkish and overlong, but so visually arresting that you might think you've seen a better film--make no mistake, Mr. Carrey will have to wait at least another year before Oscar comes calling.-Walter Chaw
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In THE MAJESTIC, Jim Carrey stretches his talents and proves that he can be a credible serious actor with his portrayal of Peter Appleton, a Hollywood B-movie screenwriter who is black listed during the McCarthy era. A car accident costs him his memory, and in the small coastal town where he ends up, he is mistaken for a local hero, presumed dead almost ten years ago in the war. Unable to recall anything of his "past" in the town, Appleton not only embraces his new identity, but becomes a pillar of the community, restoring hope that the residents lost along with many of their young men in World War II. In the process, he discovers new inspiration, new purpose, and a new life. Director Frank Darabont, true to form, tells a leisurely tale of a man's renewed faith in himself and in others. The film is an homage to old-fashioned values and proud-to-be-an-American patriotism, studded with rock-solid performances not just by Carrey, but by film veterans Martin Landau, Hal Holbrook, and Ron Rifkin, among others.
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Martin Guerre visits Bedford Falls in "The Majestic," a thick slice of bogus inspirational cheese that only makes itself look bad by recycling so many golden movie memories. Frank Darabont's latest marathon puffs itself up with an enormous sense of self-importance by injecting weighty issues relating to the U.S. Constitution and the Hollywood blacklist into a tale of an amnesiac embraced by a small town in the post-war U.S. Bursting with cliched notions of down-home Americana that it wants to pass off as profundity, this elaborately appointed production will get a running start at the box office thanks to the toplined Jim Carrey, whose performance is disappointingly reactive until the very end, and pic's obvious strokes will sucker the emotionally gullible. But unless you really can fool all the people all the time, critical and commercial results should be disappointing.
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