The Majestic Details

Frank Capra was a film-maker who created his own “Golden Age of Cinema”. He particularly celebrated small-town America and its associated values of decency and morality, in films such as It's a Wonderful Life and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. This starring vehicle for Jim Carrey is an unashamedly Capra-esque romantic drama which endorses those values and their redemptive effects. It's directed by Frank Darabont, whose previous offerings (The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile) were also founded on the idea of spiritual deliverance for their heroes. Carrey plays Peter Appleton, a blacklisted screenwriter in 1950s Hollywood who — in a state of drunken despair — accidentally drives his car off a bridge and is later found washed up on the shores of a proverbial small town, suffering from amnesia. Bizarrely, Appleton closely resembles Luke Trimble, the missing soldier son of Harry (Martin Landau), who owns the town's Majestic cinema. With the return of “Luke”, and his part in the renovation of the crumbling movie-house, the town's spirit is revived and Peter is conversely able to find his true self and worth. Here's a film that — though overlong at nearly two and a half hours — cares deeply about its characters and the virtues they represent. Frank Capra himself would look kindly on such a loving tribute to his vision of an ideal America.

Cliché-ridden drama of the triumph of small-town values that is in stark contrast to the realities of Hollywood's blacklisting.