Frank Darabont’s channeling of Frank Capra, “The Majestic”, is snugly caught in the one trap you’d think the filmmakers would have taken great pains to avoid: Jim Carrey’s white picket-fence smile. Carrey is a gifted comic, of course, and with this film he probably wanted to show that he could be equally adept at handling workaday dramatic acting. This raises one’s level of skepticism to Def-Con One from the word go, but, then again, wasn’t Tom Hanks in “Bosom Buddies” before he went on to make “Philadelphia”? Maybe, but Carrey’s bread and butter is the exaggeratedly sincere dufus who sooner or later erupts into sneering obnoxiousness. This is mostly thanks to Carrey’s chiseled face, rather than his writers; in most of his roles, his face adopts a grotesque look of neanderthal earnestness to lure his victims into one of his outpourings of fierce inanity. Hence, in “straight” roles, Carrey’s acting becomes almost superfluous because the jig is up as soon as he shows his face; the more simple-hearted integrity Carrey tries to display in “The Majestic”, the more you prepare yourself for the lunacy that never comes.

Bad tidings for a Capra-esque feature when you can’t trust the protagonist’s essential sincerity. Beyond this, Darabont proves ham-handed and blunt with his emotional themes, and the freedom of speech plot merely spins its wheels. The idea that true American ideals are best reflected in the quiet, unassuming piety of lively small towns in the 40s and 50s is slightly played out now. Messier, more ambitious movies like Soderbergh’s “Traffic” are making attempts to articulate morality in modern, urban America, and that’s the direction filmmakers should probably go in if they want their work to be relevant. Worst of all, the movie feels like a half-hearted pandering session for Oscars—there are at least two or three of these in every movie season. Although it was superior to “The Majestic”, Darabont’s last film, “The Green Mile”, reeked of the same off-putting solicitations. They might as well have confined the release of “The Majestic” to Beverly Hills and handed out Oscar ballots and prune juice with the popcorn.