But Darabont works on a scale Luce could only dream of. Call it intimate elephantine. The movie, which goes on for two and a half hours, has been designed by Gregory Melton and shot by David Tattersall as a creamy pageant of iconic perfection. No stray litter blows around the streets, no greasy spoons mar the diner, there's not a tool out of place in the hardware store, the homes are all homey little nooks. Everything is spruced-up and inviting, as if company were always coming. The exception is the town's movie theater, the Majestic, which the owner, Harry (Martin Landau, playing a wasp but with so much baggy-cardiganed wisdom he might be auditioning for Doc in a road company of "West Side Story"), closed after the war because nobody wanted to go to the movies anymore. Carrey's Peter Appleton is the catalyst whose job is to fulfill the town's appetite for dreaming again.

He appears as a stranger who doesn't remember his own name but who looks strangely familiar to the townspeople who see him. When Harry spots Peter, he knows it's his son Luke come home miraculously from the war. Peter can't remember being Luke, but he gets caught up in the role nonetheless, courting Luke's girlfriend Adele (Laurie Holden, whose adorable nose is the only distinguishing thing in this small-town sweetheart role), and getting behind Harry's plan to spruce up and reopen the Majestic. Meanwhile, certain that Peter's disappearance after he's named as a former Communist means he's a big-time Commie spy on the lam, the FBI is hunting him down to make him testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Peter's "communist" past is as flimsy and ludicrous as many of those dragged before the committee. He attended a few meetings of a socialist group in college because a girl he wanted to score with was caught up in the group. The blacklist is used shrewdly here, something the filmmakers can point to to say that theirs is not an unmitigated vision of American goodness. The trouble is that nothing about their version of the times rings true.

In the opening, Peter goes to see his movie "Sandpirates of the Sahara" at Graumann's Chinese, and we see a newsreel that reports, with undisguised contempt, the jailing of the Hollywood Ten, the group of writers and directors who refused to cooperate when called before HUAC. So how does Darabont reconcile that with the scene where another witness, refusing to cooperate, reads the committee members the First Amendment and receives a standing ovation from the crowd? People were too terrified to demonstrate in that way. (It took some heavy lobbying on the part of Edward R. Murrow, who had unimpeachable respect as a journalist as well as the power of CBS behind him, to go ahead with the documentary that spelled the end of Joe McCarthy.) Or the way the witness is let off on a technicality? (If HUAC was so willing to trample constitutional rights, why would they care any more about due process?)

So many writers and filmmakers have taken a superior attitude to the Americans gulled into believing the hysteria about a Red Menace rampant in Hollywood and the government and the military that I don't wish to add to it. But didn't it ever occur to Darabont and Sloane that the small-town people they are celebrating were likely just as susceptible to that propaganda? Yes, America did eventually see through HUAC and McCarthy, but it wasn't some spontaneous revelation that came from small-town ideas of fairness and decency.

Recent Stories