Frank Darabont’s third nostalgia piece into the past (after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile) is The Majestic, a weird and non-fulfilling piece that has something to do about movies.
Jim Carrey is Peter Appelton in the 1940’s and 50’s. He’s a B-movie screenwriter, but is trying to graduate to real films. His latest film, however, is considered Communistic, and he’s blacklisted. As he’s driving on a very fake-looking bridge, he crashes and loses his memory. He winds up on a beach and is taken to a small, idyllic town, which lost many people to the war. It turns out that people think that he’s Luke Trimble, a war hero, and Harry Trimble’s (Martin Landau) son.
I didn’t believe for a minute that Peter was actually Luke and Harry’s son. I think that there was supposed to be some sort of mystery of whether Peter was actually Luke or anyone, but you could probably guess. When Peter didn’t know, I thought that he didn’t really have chemistry with Harry. Most of the small-town sets were just façades, just like in westerns. When I took a studio tour of Universal Studios last summer, I noticed how similar everything was. I think we shouldn’t have known whether Peter was Luke or if Luke was Peter, etc.
Another thing that seemed fake was Adele’s (Laurie Holden) hiccups that she got whenever she was nervous. They didn’t really need to be there, because it’s 150-minute runtime is hard enough to sit through, and they didn’t really add any humor.
The Majestic is the name of the movie theater in the town where Harry lives, and now that they think that Luke is back, they decide to open it. That’s about the worse reason for naming a movie (besides Swimfan, of course). In fact, if that entire worthless subplot was taken out, the runtime could have been chopped by 45 minutes or so.
Carrey proves that he’s better at drama than at slapstick comedy yet again. After his terrific acting role in The Truman Show, he’s one of the better points of The Majestic. Why he continues to do idiotic comedy, I don’t know, when he could be doing much better in drama. Landau was also quite good, although I would have liked his role to be bigger. Another person’s role that was small that I wanted larger was Amanda Detmer’s role as Sandra, Peter’s girlfriend. She’s a good actress, and she should be better known. There was something about Laurie Holden. She just didn’t do anything for me.
As I look on my notes, I see I wrote “authentic if fakey music”, which contradicts itself. I think I meant that the music seemed real for the time-period, but it seemed made just for that period and this movie. Understand what I mean? Well, neither do I. And, like all time-piece dramas, there has to be a climactic courtroom scene which concludes with the main character giving a monologue on where America went wrong, etc.
It had some good drama, but it just wasn’t enough for me. They could have reworked it and released it later to make it better, which they could do a lot of.