Still, this confusion is exactly what might work in the picture's commercial favor. "The Majestic" is patriotic enough to be in tune with the times, but since the un-American evil being named is McCarthyism, liberals can stand up and cheer, too. I dread the thought that this cant might go over. "The Majestic" is one of those movies that makes you feel as if the national IQ was dropping while you're watching it. It's the return of all the homiletic clichés about an America that never existed, which were swept off the screen years ago, and which, when they were attempted during the "golden age" of the '30s and '40s, were never as popular as the wisecracking, fast-talking heroes and heroines of comedies and musicals and gangster pictures, all distinctly urban genres.

"The Majestic" moves toward a celebration of American isolationism, not just from the world, but within America itself. The only contact the residents have with the outside world seems to be newspapers and, fitting for a film so awash in illusion, movies. Outside of town lies heartache and phoniness and an evil government, and so Peter has to accept his role as the revivifier of town spirit. If "The Majestic" works for some moviegoers at all, it will be due to Jim Carrey. Nothing Jim Carrey does here is bad, exactly. He doesn't condescend to the conception, or make himself consciously heroic (except in the excruciating climactic scenes, and even then, he's not as inflated as the material would certainly allow him to be).

The movie trades on what's barely been noticed in his roles as crazies and spazzes and oddballs: his open-faced good looks. He's got an all-American freshness here that's more appealing than banal, and given the shameless melodramatic twists the movie indulges in, he underplays as much as possible. But he's still blanding himself out. By that I don't just mean that he's not showing sparks of his comic inventiveness (the role doesn't allow for it -- and he doesn't go saintly, as Robin Williams does in his dramatic roles), but that he's giving himself over to a conception that's not worthy of him.

There's no zip, no wit, not even the genuinely touching quality he had playing a man who was a bit of bumpkin in "The Mask," and certainly not the sweetness he showed as the hero of "The Truman Show," playing a man living in a hermetically sealed universe of small-town perfection. I feared for Carrey watching "The Majestic," in the way that watching the later upright men played by Gary Cooper made you long for the sexy young actor he was, the one Frank Capra crushed out of him. In the end of "The Truman Show," Truman left the stifling sterility of his make-believe world behind. The town in "The Majestic" is hermetically sealed as well, but by the residents' conviction, and eventually Peter's, that the outside world just isn't worth their while.

The best American movie heroes may have finally embraced virtue (like Bogart in "Casablanca"), but they kept their tough, faux-cynical veneer. In "The Majestic" goodness is equated with divesting yourself of all traces of cleverness or worldliness or doubt. It's exactly the vision of America that the blacklisters and Commie hunters were promoting, even though it could also be the sort of fantasy that blacklisted writers and directors like Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr. and Edward Dmytryk might have had of finding themselves acclaimed as apple-pie American heroes. You just know that, if Peter ever goes back to screenwriting when the blacklist is over, he'll make lousy pictures.

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