Young Hollywood screenwriter Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey) is blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a Communist sympathizer in 1951. His girlfriend dumps him when she finds he's been nailed and he becomes depressed. He has a freak car accident where he ends up unconscious in an estuary and is washed up on the shore by a small town in California. He has amnesia, not remembering anything, and is mistaken for a young soldier presumed dead during WWII who was the son of a man owning an old local movie theatre. It's what you'd call a dramedy, partially filled with romance and humor.
Rater #1
Has not seen movie.
Rater #2
6/10. Frank Darabont's third nostalgia piece into the past (after The
Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile) is The Majestic, a weird and
non-fulfilling piece that has something to do about movies.
Jim Carrey is Peter Appelton in the 1940's and 50's. He's a B-movie
screenwriter, but is trying to graduate to real films. His latest
film, however, is considered Communistic, and he's blacklisted. As
he's driving on a very fake-looking bridge, he crashes and loses his
memory. He winds up on a beach and is taken to a small, idyllic town,
which lost many people to the war. It turns out that people think
that he's Luke Trimble, a war hero, and Harry Trimble's (Martin
Landau) son.
I didn't believe for a minute that Peter was actually Luke and
Harry's son. I think that there was supposed to be some sort of
mystery of whether Peter was actually Luke or anyone, but you could
probably guess. When Peter didn't know, I thought that he didn't
really have chemistry with Harry. Most of the small-town sets were
just fa�ades, just like in westerns. When I took a studio tour of
Universal Studios last summer, I noticed how similar everything was.
I think we shouldn't have known whether Peter was Luke or if Luke was
Peter, etc.
Another thing that seemed fake was Adele's (Laurie Holden) hiccups
that she got whenever she was nervous. They didn't really need to be
there, because it's 150-minute runtime is hard enough to sit through,
and they didn't really add any humor.
The Majestic is the name of the movie theater in the town where Harry
lives, and now that they think that Luke is back, they decide to open
it. That's about the worse reason for naming a movie (besides
Swimfan, of course). In fact, if that entire worthless subplot was
taken out, the runtime could have been chopped by 45 minutes or so.
Carrey proves that he's better at drama than at slapstick comedy yet
again. After his terrific acting role in The Truman Show, he's one of
the better points of The Majestic. Why he continues to do idiotic
comedy, I don't know, when he could be doing much better in drama.
Landau was also quite good, although I would have liked his role to
be bigger. Another person's role that was small that I wanted larger
was Amanda Detmer's role as Sandra, Peter's girlfriend. She's a good
actress, and she should be better known. There was something about
Laurie Holden. She just didn't do anything for me.
As I look on my notes, I see I wrote "authentic if fakey music",
which contradicts itself. I think I meant that the music seemed real
for the time-period, but it seemed made just for that period and this
movie. Understand what I mean? Well, neither do I. And, like all time-
piece dramas, there has to be a climactic courtroom scene which
concludes with the main character giving a monologue on where America
went wrong, etc.
It had some good drama, but it just wasn't enough for me. They could
have reworked it and released it later to make it better, which they
could do a lot of.
Rater #3
Has Not Seen Movie.
Rater #4
10/10. This movie was awesome. It was one of the first movies where Jim Carrey was serious. Even though the humorous characters he's played in other movies are pretty funny, he's usually a doofus. It shows that he can be a really good actor in dramas. I'm glad there was some humor in the movie or else it would've been to depressing, but never boring. I think all the actors did pretty well. For some of the actors who played lesser characters, this could be their lucky break.
