Out and out feel-good-factor film (From Western Telegraph)

Out and out feel-good-factor film

The Majestic

Directed by Frank Darabont Starring Jim Carey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, David Ogden Stiers. (Cert. PG, Dur. 153 mins)

This weeks headline movie is one I have eagerly awaited. In The Majestic, its Jim Carrey again taking the leading role in a film, which is an out and out feel good factor film, this time without the fantasy element that the examples above contain.

Carey plays Peter Appleton, a screenwriter in the 50s who is the toast of Hollywood having recently had a huge hit with a trivial adventure movie.

As so often happens with screenwriters in real life, the spoils of the big time only serve to blind him to the way the Hollywood movie machine really works. In terms of his career he is suddenly invincible, thinking that the script he really wanted to write, the deep and meaningful film, will still have the appeal of the popcorn-munching blockbuster.

Unfortunately, he hears some faceless studio executives damning his work and then, to top off a really bad day, he comes under the scornful examination of the House Committee On Un-American Activities. McCarthys witch-hunts are well under way and Appletons college flirtation with communists has suddenly come back to haunt him. How quickly the charmed life can fall apart. His film is in the toilet and suddenly his friends dont take his calls.

Scoot forward and Appleton arrives in a soda fountain on the corner town of Lawson. Warm cookies and milk - USA. He has lost his memory form the recent trauma so when he is recognised, not as failed writer Pete Appleton, but as local war hero, lost in action and suddenly returned home, Luke Trimble, he goes along with it.

The returning hero, with a father and beautiful fiance, with the challenge of doing up his fathers ailing cinema The Majestic to give the town a post-war lift and himself a kind of rebirth, is certainly better than being who he was. Unfortunately the FBI holds no truck with amnesiac communists and is closing in.

The Majestic is a strange film. What I just wrote sounds like the perfect little film that it should be, but isnt. It just lacks some spark, some intrigue, something original that would make it come alive. Martin landau gives a superb performance as the bereaved cinema owner and the supporting cast completes the pastiche town really well, with what they are given to work with. As for Carrey? he obviously tries desperately hard here to not be Jim Carrey.

His face, famous for The Mask and Grinch gurning that has mad him a modern comic genius, is under strict orders to keep still. Somewhere along the way to serious acting though he loses his spark and so, good as he is, very good in fact, he just falls short of making Appleton or Trimble truly memorable.

If director-producer Frank Darabont thought he was making something more important than he was, it would account for whats missing from The Majestic.

So did I enjoy it? Yes. Though it may not make the top five after all I did enjoy it enormously. Its light entertainment. Story-telling with a community spirit or to use an Oprah-ism I despise: soul food.