Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The new Jim Carrey movie is an elephantine, oppressively sentimental look at small-town America at the time of the Hollywood blacklist.
Dec 21, 2001 | In Preston Sturges' great 1944 World War II comedy, "Hail the Conquering Hero," Eddie Bracken plays a small-town boy mustered out of the Marines because of his chronic hay fever. He hides out in San Francisco, working in a shipyard and sending letters home to his mother with phony stories of his combat experience overseas. Dragged home by six Marines on leave, he finds himself acclaimed as the town hero, a survivor of Guadalcanal and an unwilling candidate for mayor.
In "The Majestic," which is set about 10 years later, Jim Carrey plays a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter whose car careers off a bridge in a rainstorm. Surviving the accident but amnesiac, he washes up on the shores of a small California town still reeling from all the local sons lost in the war, and is mistaken for the town's war hero, who's been presumed dead and buried for the last decade.
Sturges' movie, like all his movies, is about the dementia that ordinary people are capable of, in this case the myths of American innocence and patriotism. "Hail the Conquering Hero" is both satiric and loving. Sturges' characters exist in a sort of patriotic fever dream, but it's their intense belief in that dream that winds up eliciting all sorts of small, vital acts of decency, and also allows Bracken's character to become a genuine hero. The irony of the movie is that the heroes that dream celebrates have seen too much to ever fully believe in the small-town life that honors them, even though they want nothing more than to believe in it.
Frank Darabont, who directed "The Majestic" (as well as "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile"), is not a man given to irony. "The Majestic," which was written by Michael Sloane, is oppressively sentimental and uplifting. It's basically "Hail the Conquering Hero" redone as an unironic celebration of small-town American virtues -- that is to say, with no sense that the idealized vision it depicts is in any way false.
"The Majestic"
Directed by Frank Darabont
Starring Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden
There's none of the pettiness or gossip that Sturges' characters are capable of, none of the crazy individuality that was his way of saying that ordinary people can be some of the most extraordinary characters you'll ever meet. Each of the characters in "The Majestic" fulfills his or her civic/central casting function: There's the kindly town doc, the good-looking dame who runs the diner, the doddering dear-old duffer with the town movie house, the cheerily boosterish mayor, the kids who've graduated high school and stayed on to marry their sweethearts, and the wise old black man, that contemporary movie sop to the sins of our racist past in real life as well as in our pop culture.
Even the embittered war vet turns out to be a stand-up guy. And true to the blasé familiarity of these types, the movie is populated with blasé actors (James Whitmore, acting with his eyebrows as usual) or actors striving to be blasé (David Ogden Stiers as the town doctor). All that's missing is Hal Holbrook, and damned if he doesn't turn up later on as a congressman.
When Peter admits that he finds it strange he can recall the plots of movies but not his former life, you wonder, Why, for God's sake? Towns like this exist only in the movies, and I kept waiting for some "Twilight Zone" plot twist telling us that Peter had somehow landed in one of his scripts. But no -- Darabont means us to take this hamlet utopia straight, not to snort when the town beauty reveals that she was inspired to become a lawyer after seeing Paul Muni in "The Life of Emile Zola." Henry Luce would have killed to get this perfect a vision of small-town America into the pages of "Life."
