Sure, Americans say they love Frank Capra, but that’s because they think he’s an optimist. Few seem to appreciate how truly bleak his films are; yes, Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper find redemption and vindication in the end, but only after spending the bulk of the movie being beaten down by horrifically dark forces. People celebrate Capra as a champion of supposed small-town values like tolerance and compassion when what they’re really feeling is nostalgia for an imagined sense of community that may never have existed outside the movies.

Or at least didn’t exist until September 11. Now we’re living in our own Capra movie, with real dark forces arrayed against ordinary folk who prove their heroism at terrible cost, and with people spontaneously coming together to help their neighbors. Which is why The Majestic, Hollywood’s latest misreading of Capra, may be timed to benefit from a horrible serendipity.

Surely the cheeriest movie that will ever be set during the Hollywood Red Scare, Frank Darabont’s film stars Jim Carrey as Peter Appleton, a rising screenwriter whose ridiculously tenuous tie to a campus Communist group back in college gets him blacklisted during the McCarthyist hysteria in 1951. He goes on a bender, has an accident, bumps his head, and wakes up in a seaside hamlet called Lawson, with no memory of who he is. (The town’s name is a misguided tribute, one that will be lost on most of the audience, to a real-life blacklist victim, Hollywood Ten member John Howard Lawson.) The locals mistake him for Luke Trimble (whose name suggests a variation on Dalton Trumbo, another Hollywood Ten blacklisted screenwriter), the town golden boy who went missing in action during World War II. Luke was one of many Lawson youths lost during the war, so his apparent return rejuvenates the whole town, a revival culminating in Peter/Luke’s renovation of the Majestic, the Trimble family’s once-grand movie palace (well, it’s supposed to be a palace, though it’s about the size of the Brattle).

The movie means to be a departure for Carrey; unlike even his serious roles in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, this one demands that he not clown at all. He’s supposed to be just the aw-shucks Stewart type who, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, saves a town full of people by himself and is saved by them in return. Carrey pulls it off with a light touch (imagine how much more dour the movie would have been with no-fun-anymore Tom Hanks), but the role seems a waste of his gifts.

Director Darabont, too, is stretching; this is his first nostalgia piece that isn’t a Stephen King prison film. He still hasn’t figured out how to make a movie under two and a half hours, but in The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, every scene paid off eventually by revealing some key aspect of plot or character. Darabont wrote those films but not this one (it’s by his high-school pal Michael Sloane, whose only other produced screenplay was for the slasher flick Hollywood Boulevard II), and there’s little illumination of character because the Lawson residents aren’t persons, just backstories. Each is exactly what he or she appears to be, and no one has grown or changed in the six years since the war ended. No wonder screenwriter Peter is so easily accepted — he doesn’t have to remember anyone’s life stories because they’re so easy to guess.

Darabont is trafficking here in a nostalgia — for old movies, old movie palaces, and that Capra-esque sense of community and moral certainty — that he doesn’t really earn. The movie’s climax, in which the memory-restored Peter appears before the House Un-American Activities Committee and out-jingos the witch hunters with a heroic speech that even Capra might have found a bit much, shows the filmmakers suffering from the same wish-fulfillment fantasy (or you could call it collective denial) as the Lawson folk, who accept Peter as Luke primarily because they need to believe that something good survived the catastrophe. A more relevant comparison here than to Capra might be to his contemporary Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero, which treats a similar act of patriotic collective denial with satirical bite.

Still, with the whole country having turned into Lawson recently, maybe we need that kind of wish fulfillment. There’s a scene where Luke’s father (Martin Landau), overcome with joy and heartbreak at his son’s apparent return, pauses to reflect and then takes down the gold star from the window of his dilapidated theater’s box office. That scene might have seemed corny four months ago; now it will have you in tears.

Issue Date: December 20 - 27, 2001

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