‘Majestic’ abandons honesty, gets mired in easy emotionality

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In theaters

THE MAJESTIC, directed by Frank Darabont, written by Michael Sloane, 152 minutes, rated PG.

The new Frank Darabont movie, “The Majestic,” is a Hollywood sham, a honey-drenched wallow through the tear ducts that features Jim Carrey in his most desperate bid yet for an Academy Award.

In the film, Carrey is in full apple-pie mode as Peter Appleton, a 1950s screenwriter blacklisted by the studios during the McCarthy era’s Red Scare for allegedly being a communist.

Cast out of his job and tossed aside like yesterday’s bad script, Peter plunges into a depression. Seeking comfort from his toy monkey – yes, his toy monkey, whose stuffed presence actually eclipses Carrey’s stuffed performance – Peter gets drunk at a local watering hole, takes off for a spirited car ride out of town and eventually careens over a bridge, where he plummets into a river and is struck with amnesia.

Now literally washed up in Lawrence, Calif., a small town so absurdly warm-and-fuzzy, it makes Mayberry look as if it spawned the devil, Peter is mistaken for Luke Trimble, one of 62 young men Lawrence lost 10 years before in World War II.

What ensues is absolute hokum, a long-winded bore that tries so hard to exhume the spirit of Frank Capra, it dies from trying.

The film, which Darabont directed from Michael Sloane’s maudlin script, mines none of Capra’s humanity, truth or heart – but then how can it since it doesn’t have an honest moment in it?

With the exception of Laurie Holden, who’s passable as Carrey’s love interest, the film’s bit characters are especially poorly conceived, a co-dependent group of small-town stereotypes who behave as if they just crawled out of their pods – an idea the film reinforces with references to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

That all of this builds to Peter defending himself against the House Un-American Activities Committee in a forced courtroom scene may be the element Darabont believes he needs to swell our hearts, but since his handling of the event is as bogus as Carrey’s performance, audiences might wish everyone involved had just taken the Fifth and kept their mouths shut.

It’s a shame, really. Darabont scored big with his two previous films, “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” but in the absence of Stephen King’s prisons, he finds himself locked in a bad movie with no one to bail him out. “The Majestic” is a nostalgic sugar pill that wants to get lodged in your throat, but it dissolves so quickly, you might dismiss it as an irritant.

Grade: D-

AMELIE, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, written by Guillaume Laurant, in French with English subtitles, 115 minutes, rated R, starts tonight, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

“Amelie,” on the other hand, is terrific, a smart, quirky crowd-pleaser from France that stands as one of the year’s best films.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a man whose previous works -“Delicatessen,” “City of Lost Children” and “Alien Resurrection” – are so dark, it’s difficult to imagine him creating anything as lighthearted as this. The film is fast-paced and often hilarious, especially in its opening moments, which follow the pitfalls and absurdities of young Amelie’s life as she steps tentatively into a world fraught with cruelty and injustice.

Born to eccentric parents – a father who rarely touched her, a strict mother accidentally crushed by a stranger’s suicidal leap – Amelie (Audrey Tautou) grows into a shy, 23-year-old waif living a lonely life in Jeunet’s gorgeous, digitally cleaned-up version of Paris.

A waitress by trade, she stumbles upon her true calling by accident. Behind a loose tile in her bathroom is a tin box filled with a boy’s childhood keepsakes, items Amelie herself would want returned if they were her own.

Launching into action, she tracks down the box’s owner, now a grown man, and anonymously delivers it to him, an act of kindness that brings the man to tears of joy.

Filled with joy, too, something we expect Amelie has rarely felt, she becomes a modern-day Miss Lonelyhearts, fluttering about her Montmartre neighborhood and fixing everyone’s life but her own. But when she meets the mysterious Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), a fellow eccentric whose spare time is spent reassembling the lives of others in his bizarre scrapbook, Amelie’s world is shaken. Does she herself have the courage to love?

Working from a screenplay by Guillaume Laurant, Jeunet strengthens what appears to be an otherwise pat narrative with a string of unexpected complexities. Much like “The Majestic,” his film is a fairy tale, but unlike Darabont’s film, none of it seems like a lie.

Joining last year’s “Chocolat,” “Amelie” is so good, it will win a nomination for Best Foreign Film. But its star-making performance from the unforgettable Audrey Tautou, who’s physically like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Louise Brooks as imagined by Francois Truffaut, will make it the foreign film to beat.

Grade: A

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.

THE VIDEO-DVD CORNER

Renting a video or a DVD? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

Moulin Rouge ? A-

The Princess Diaries ? C+

Scary Movie 2 ? D

Hedwig and the

Angry Inch ? A

Jurassic Park III ? B-

Lost & Delirious ? C-

Rush Hour 2 ? D

The Score ? B

American Outlaws ? F

Ghost of Mars ? C-

Pearl Harbor ? D

Summer Catch ? C-

Bread and Roses ? A-

Divided We Fall ? A

Made ? B

Pootie Tang ? D+

Osmosis Jones ? C-

Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch

Stole Christmas ? D+

Planet of the Apes ? C-

America’s Sweethearts ? D+

crazy/beautiful ? B

Tomb Raider ? D+

Doctor Zhivago

(DVD debut) ?A-

The Golden Bowl ? C+

Legally Blonde ? B+

Shrek ? A-

Aimee & Jaguar ? A

The Animal ? B

Swordfish ? C

With a Friend Like Harry ? A-

Dr. Dolittle 2 ? C-

Dumbo (DVD debut) ? A

Final Fantasy: The Spirits

Within ? C+

Freddy Got Fingered ? BOMB

Monty Python and the Holy

Grail ? B+

Angel Eyes ? C+

Cats & Dogs ? B+

Star Wars: The Phantom

Menace (DVD debut) ? B

Town & Country ? C+

Bridget Jones’s Diary ? A-

One Night at McCool’s ? C-

Snow White and the Seven

Dwarfs (DVD debut) ? A+

Heartbreakers ? B+

The Mummy Returns ? D

Along Came a Spider ? C-

Citizen Kane

(DVD debut) ? A+

A Knight’s Tale ? C

Amores Perros ? A

Crocodile Dundee in

Los Angeles ? C-

Driven ? D

The Luzhin Defense ? B+

Startup.com ? A-

The Widow of St. Pierre ? A-

Spy Kids ? A-

Blow ? D+

Someone Like You ? D

The Dish ? A-

Exit Wounds ? D

Memento ? A-

The Tailor of Panama ? A-

Joe Dirt ? D+

See Spot Run ? F

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate

Factory (DVD debut) ? A-