The Majestic (2001)
Grade: D+
Actors: Jim Carrey, Laurie Holden, Hal Holbrook, Bob Balaban, Amanda Detmer, and Martin Landau
Director: Frank Darabont
Rated PG for mild language and adult situations


I'm beginning to worry about myself. Why? Because at the ripe old age of 17, I'm afraid that I have become too cynical to embrace a film such as "The Majestic". With it's good heart, and old fashioned morals, I can't say that I really relate to it all that much. Could it have been the fact that this film is sticky sweet and has absolutely no edge. At least in director Frank Darabont's last two outings there had been a small straying from the norm, be it the subject matter of "The Shawshank Redemption" or the execution scenes in "The Green Mile". Here, we get nothing , but more on that later.

"The Majestic" revolves around Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey), a blacklisted screenwriter who attended communist meetings in college to impress a girl. Now, his past has caught up with him and he is called in to testify. Upset that his movie has been put on standstill and his girlfriend has dumped him, he goes on a midnight drive. On a bridge in the middle of nowhere, he takes a turn for the worst and ends up driving off the side and waking up in Lawson, a small town just a hop, skip, and jump away from Los Angeles.

When he's discovered, laying on the beach, he is taken for one of the many boys that were shipped out for war and reported MIA, named Luke Trimble. His father (Martin Landau) lives above an abandoned old movie theater called The Majestic. Now that Luke is back, his father decides that it's time to reopen The Majestic so people can experience the movies once again.

Then of course, there's the obligatory lost love subplot with a girl named Adele (Laurie Holden) who is now a lawyer and still in love with Luke. Her father just happens to be the town doctor, and when Peter is taken in to be looked at, the doctor immediately recognizes him. Then, the dad dies, and a bunch of stuff happens that's supposed to tug at our heartstrings and make us see the good in ourselves.

Well, it didn't work. My main complaint is the structure of the film. Knowing that Peter wasn't really Luke just kept grating at me, and it restricted my ability for suspension of disbelief. That doesn't work to the film's advantage in any way. It was just looming in the back of my mind the whole time and forced me to disconnect with the film.

Mr. Darabont should have thought about starting the film when Peter is discovered on the beach and have the "Is he or isn't he?" vibe loom around him through the whole movie. It just seems a little too convenient when he admits to two people that he's not Luke that they both had the same reaction, "I knew it!" Moments like those make the film too hard to accept.

Like I said before, the film doesn't have on single edge at all. Unlike "Green Mile" and "Shawshank", where we get good plot and some nasty execution scenes, we get nothing here. We get a "hair-raising" speech about what it means to be an American and live the American dream to practice whatever kind of religion we want of hold any beliefs that we feel to be truths. If the rest of the film had worked, I surely would have bought into this, but having been disconnected from the film, the words held no meaning to me. I didn't get caught up in the relationship with the father or Adele, so the fact that she gave him the pocket version of the Constitution that Luke gave to her holds no water with me.

As much as Mr. Landau tries, he can't even infuse chemistry into his relationship with Luke because Jim Carrey would rather play it big, loud, and obnoxious than tone it down and act like a real, normal, sane person. Basically, his performance here is nothing more than a charicature of his performance in "The Truman Show".

Mr. Landau is good in his role, perhaps even Oscar worthy. His is the only memorable performance of the bunch. Laurie Holden in her first big motion picture looks like a crackhead with her glazed over eyes and bad die job. Her lack of acting skills and emotion might also be a problem later on in her career.

This film plays so many cards and tries to be so Capra-esque that it looses all of the power it had the potential to contain. And for those reasons, I can not help but abstain from singing this film's praises.


--Brian Jones, 2002