With his crowd-pleasers The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) director Frank Darabont showed that sentimentality could take you a long way, but with The Majestic, an overstuffed Capraesque fantasy about the joys of small-town America he went just too far, even Americans themselves finding it a glossily over-idealized portrait of a time and place that never really was. And this is quite apart from the barely tenable pivotal plot point that an entire town, even including his father and girlfriend, are able to mistake the identity of a grown man after a mere nine year's absence. Add to this the fact that in the lead Jim Carrey, then in his early forties was too old to play a character supposedly in his late twenties and you've got a considerable credibility gap that only gets wider as the film wades deeper into the saccharine.
Carrey plays Peter Appleton, a B-film screenwriter who gets blacklisted during the McCarthy-led HUAC witch-hunts. His film-in-production gets cancelled, his girlfriend dumps him and one night, driving along the California coast, he has an accident and drives off a bridge. He washes ashore on the sands of a sleepy coastal town, Lawson, where he is welcomed as returned war hero, Luke Trimble, who went missing in action during the war. As Appleton is suffering from complete memory loss he has no choice but to go along with scenario particularly as his Dad (Martin Landau) and especially his gorgeous girlfriend (Laurie Holden) claim him as the real Luke.
Writer Michael Sloane was no doubt familiar with the art-house hit The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) which was set in the 16th century rural France. It got a very similar mistaken identity concept to work but used the yokel factor to make it plausible. Here the strategy is to gloss over the improbability of the scenario with a lot of hokey small town goings-on and endearing characters any of whom could have come out of Capra's '40s classics such as It's A Wonderful Life (1946) or Sam Woods’ 1940 paean to provincial America, Our Town, as Luke and his dear ol' Dad with the help of the endlessly cheery townsfolk set about restoring the old cinema, The Majestic, to its former glory (it seems highly unlikely that such a homespun lot would have been treated to A Streetcar Named Desire as their opening film)
Darabont lets the hokiness ooze like treacle over flapjacks accompanied by Mark Isham’s atypically syrupy score in a combo that is clearly meant to warm the cockles of the audience’s heart with Carrey all gooily agape and agog at the folksy good-naturedness which surrounds him. Eventually the truth comes out and the veil is briefly torn from the townsfolk's eyes but, inspired by his gorgeous now-ex-girlfriend and the ideal represented by the real Luke (who, helpfully, has given Laurie a copy of the American Constitution as a graduation present...whadda guy!), Appleton stands up to HUAC and, of course, returns to Lawson and, the girl, a real hero.
Oddly, there is a kind of a running satirical joke about the manipulativeness of Hollywood that perhaps suggests particularly as both films starred Carrey, that Darabont and Sloane were trying to do an inverted version of Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998) with Appleton eventually choosing to validate the golden-hued purlieus of fictional Lawson over the realities of the cynical world at large. Maybe.
The production values are first class and in one of his straight roles Carrey does a decent job of showing a degree of ambivalence in his character, only occasionally falling back on his comedic persona in the latter stages of the film. It is surprising that more has not been seen of the very photogenic Ms.Holden who was making her film debut but has since largely worked in television. But then no-one's career really flourished after this bar perhaps that of Bob Balaban who plays a particularly mean-spirited HUAC prosecutor.