(rated PG-13, 150 mins.)
It’s 1950 and a young, ambitious screenwriter Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey) has it all until one night a car accident lands him washed ashore in another world amnesia-style. The amnesia timing is ideal considering he was about to be blacklisted as a writer for Communist material. Suddenly he finds himself in small town USA where his supposed father (Martin Landau) tells him that he’s his presumed dead son Luke from World War II. Suddenly Luke aka Appelton is the bell of the ball and the town hero, not to mention his father has a long lost dream of renovating their old home which happens to be residence in a movie theatre called “The Majestic”. Ultimately Carrey will testify to a Senate committee hearing and decide on life as a nobody that’s well loved, or life as a somebody in big trouble. Either way you won’t really care. Why? It’s too coincidental that a screenwriter would just happen to be the long lost son of a theater owner, and it’s too crazy that a town wouldn’t recognize that he’s indeed not Luke after only 9 years. I don’t know about you, but after my 10 and even 20 year High School reunion I would know if somebody wasn’t who they claimed to be. Carrey however, can pull off dramatic (think “The Truman Show”) in this slow-moving nicey-nice Capra type story directed by Frank “The Shawshank Redemption” Darabont.