Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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I don't like to use phrases like "quite poor" and "real stinker" but this movie was a real stinker and also quite poor.
The Majestic (2001)
Frank Darabont’s elephantine 2001 flop The Majestic is an embarrassingly earnest, just plain embarrassing tribute to the heroism of our fighting boys in World War II, the principles our great nation was founded upon, the sunny perfection of small towns and the magic of movies and movie palaces that fails to do justice to any of the things it professes to love.
A painfully miscast Jim Carrey leaves a charisma void at the film’s core with a one-dimensional, one-note performance as Peter Appleton, an ambitious young screenwriter in early 1950s Hollywood whose career hits a brick wall in the Red Scare. The fresh-faced scribe attended a politically suspect meeting as a young man to impress a cute girl and ended up on a list with the potential to end his career in its infancy.
The distraught storyteller goes for a drive that ends with him waking up after a car accident in the tiny town of Lawson, California with amnesia. When big-hearted movie theater owner Harry Trimble (Martin Landau) tells Peter that he’s his long-lost son, a war hero who seemingly died in World War II, and seeks his help in re-opening the titular movie palace, Peter assumes that the older man is being honest because he does not know otherwise.
Lawson, California is a patriotic wet dream of small town America as an innocent paradise where everyone knows everyone else and loves their country above all else. It’s so impossibly idyllic that it makes Mayberry look nightmarish and dystopian by comparison.
Inhabiting the role of a profoundly good man eager to give all for what he believes in has a transformative effect on our hero, as does spending time with the nicest, kindest, most All-American people in human history.
When our hero’s true identity is discovered and he’s called upon to testify in front of a cartoonishly evil Congressional committee he responds with a patently phony, irritatingly theatrical display of nobility.
The Majestic comes out cravenly against the Blacklist and House of Un-American Activities Committee and in favor of heroism, sacrifice and the Constitution. It’s cornball wannabe Capra, one hundred and fifty two minutes of maudlin, sentimental drivel that panders relentlessly and shamelessly to the audience’s love of movies and country but deservedly bombed with critics and audiences all the same.
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