You could look at The Majestic in two very different ways. The easy way is a a straightforward dramatic piece where the protagonist starts high, has a tough break, starts to recover, seems to recover, has it taken away, and then in a daring gamble wins it all back. That would be expected, almost formulaic, in a Hollywood movie. And you don’t get much more Hollywood than a movie produced by Warner Brothers.
Or you could look at this collaboration between writer Michael Sloane and his high school (Hollywood High School, actually) pal, director Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), as an attempt to satirize Hollywood a la The Player but even more so because even the script plays it so straight. But the framing scenes, where we see star Jim Carrey sitting in an office chair and hear the clearly recognizable voices of famous movie directors like Carl and Rob Reiner, Gary Marshall, and Sydney Pollack discussing how to improve the script Carrey’s character (Fred Appleton) is writing, seem to almost mock the remainder of the film as too formulaic, too perfect.
Carrey’s writer faces the archetypical problem of Hollywood players in the early 1950s, when The Majestic takes place, of coming to the attention to the witchhunt of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy’s fellow Red haters. His character’s name, sort of, in tribute to Dalton Trumbo, is Trimble. Trumbo was a famous screenwriter whose career and life were nearly ruined by the committee on trumped up charges. If you don’t know what the blacklist was, Google will tell you.
Instead of facing up to this trouble, Appleton gets drunk and decides to take a late night drive up the coast; a few hours later he’s driving off a bridge and barely survives the drop. The next morning a dog finds him knocked out, washed up on some beach. An old man, the dog’s owner, comes to his rescue and takes into a tiny little backwater town. Where he is recognized as the lost (and thought dead) since World War II son of Harry Trimble (Martin Landau, such a good actor). Appleton has amnesia, truly, and has no idea if he is Luke Trimble or Joe Blow. I guess they didn’t think of checking his fingerprints, huh?
Eventually his past catches up to him, his car is found, the committee’s investigators confront him, and he regains his memory. But in the meanwhile Luke’s return has brought life back to a dead town. Joy and the 1000 watt Carrey smile and so this turn is devastating. All of sudden the townsfolk admit to Appleton that they realized long before that he wasn’t Luke but “the town needed Luke.” He returns to Los Angeles but, channeling the real Luke’s spirit, defies history, his own character, and the threat of jail (quite a few people went for so-called contempt of Congress in the real deal) to tell the fascists where they can stick their dastardly behavior.
I guess which of the two ways to look at this film is up to each viewer. I certainly didn’t find any mention of the odder interpretation mentioned elsewhere. But as a Deconstructionist might say, the meaning must be taken from the text and not from the author’s intention; either can be held up.
Recommended
BillSaysThis 