director/screenwriter/producer
Andrew Niccol
cinematographer
Edward Lachman
music
Carter Burwell
editor
Paul Rubell
cast
Al Pacino (Viktor Taransky)
Catherine Keener (Elaine Christian)
Evan Rachel Wood (Lainey Christian)
Jason Schwartzman (Milton)
Elias Koteas (Hank Aleno)
Pruitt Taylor Vince (Max Sayer)
Winona Ryder (Nicola Anders)
Jay Mohr (Hal Sinclair)
Rachel Roberts (Simone)
Jeffrey Pierce (Kent)
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (Faith)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 117m
u.s.
release: 8/23/02
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
site
other andrew
niccol films
reviewed on this website:
- gattaca
- lord
of war
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S1M0NE seems to have fallen victim to Box-Office Curse
#17: People won't go see movies about moviemaking. In this case,
they're missing a compelling little fable from Andrew Niccol,
whose artistic success, to these eyes, has been in inverse proportion
to his box-office success: He wrote and directed 1997's superb
Gattaca,
and wrote 1998's overrated but lucrative The
Truman Show (Peter Weir directed). S1M0NE looks
to go the way of Gattaca's brief life in uncrowded theaters,
and while it's not on the level of Niccol's debut, it's entertaining
and provocative enough.
The first mistake some critics
are making is to assume that S1M0NE is intended as a satire
of the Hollywood and media machines. I don't think it is; the
movie should really be called Viktor, after its protagonist
Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino), a pompous and flailing film director
whose mega-starlet leading lady (Winona Ryder in an amusing,
if ill-timed for her defense, performance) has walked out on
his latest production due to "creative differences."
Growls Viktor, "Here's the difference: I'm creative, you're
not." The movie half-yearns for the days when directors,
not stars, called the shots, though this yearning is placed in
the mouth of Viktor, who overlooks the fact that in the old days
studio heads called the shots and directors were as powerless
and interchangeable as the stars.
Computer wingnut Elias Koteas
delivers Viktor's salvation on a platter (literally) -- a disc
containing programming to create a virtual actress. Yes, the
technology is finally there, and only Viktor knows about it.
After nine months he's created the perfect actress, Simone (Rachel
Roberts), and plugged her into the role originally filled by
his former female lead. Everyone loves Simone; the movie is a
massive critical and popular hit, soon joined by another Taransky/Simone
epic, and Simone becomes the first actress in Oscar history to
tie with herself for Best Actress.
S1M0NE isn't about media manipulation, though Niccol
shows us plenty of it. Two reporters (Pruitt Taylor Vince and
Jason Schwartzman) devote themselves to uncovering the truth
about the never-seen-in-the-flesh Simone; studio head Elaine
Christian (Catherine Keener), who's also Viktor's ex-wife, wants
to meet the star who's made her so much richer. Like any good
program, Simone does exactly what Viktor tells her to do; she
never malfunctions (except for some pixillation due to insufficient
memory during a satellite interview), and everything is perfect.
Too perfect. Pacino plays Viktor subtly as an artistic
windbag who grows to resent his own creation's stealing his thunder.
Even his attempts to unmake her -- there's a pretty funny clip
from I Am Pig, supposedly Simone's "directorial debut"
starring herself -- just enhance her popularity.
"You have something I
don't have," the computer geek tells Viktor: "an eye."
So does Niccol, whose cinematographer (the noted Edward Lachman)
gives the movie the warm yet deceptive glaze of digital enchantment.
Both Gattaca and S1M0NE look far more ravishing
than their stories absolutely demand, especially since both movies
unfold almost exclusively indoors. Niccol also comes up with
a great moment of sad beauty: when Viktor second-guesses himself
and pulls the plug on Simone, she disappears, literally bit by
bit (or byte by byte), from his screen, a flurry of flesh-colored
pixels, leaving her left eye to linger for a moment in mute,
vaguely accusatory mid-stare before it, too, disappears. (The
movie is certainly ocularly obsessed: the computer geek has an
inoperable eye tumor, and at the end of his alleyway scene with
Viktor we see stagehands in the background moving a large backdrop
with an eye painted on it.)
On the surface, the movie appears
to be another cautionary tale about being careful what you wish
for, but under the surface we find a metaphor for fear of success
on the wrong terms -- selling out. Or, worse, getting the power
to rise to your level of incompetence. We also see clips from
Viktor's movies, and they're made to look gruesomely pretentious
and melodramatic. Even the second one, based on a script he wrote
nine years ago ("It's close to my heart"), looks terrible
even though you figure the studio wouldn't have interfered to
make it that way. By then, Viktor has enough clout to do what
he wants -- he made it that way.
That Viktor's two banal Simone
movies are insanely successful, and that Simone branches off
into advertising and recording, are probably Niccol's comments
on what an increasingly numbed and uncritical public will accept
as a diversion. But at the movie's heart is an artist's self-critique.
Niccol could have told his three stories to date in novel form,
blank verse, whatever; he chose to tell them in a medium that
celebrates and rewards mediocrity more and more with each passing
year. But if artists quit the medium in disgust, mediocrity wins.
Like Viktor, Niccol knows how corrupt the game is, but he's willing
to stay in it anyway, and he plays honorably.
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