This movie is an example of historical revisionism at its worst. It has Jim Carrey, who has moved from being offensively irritating as Ace Ventura to being equally irritating in his good ol' boy straight roles, playing the innocent victim of a HUAC witch hunt at the height of the McCarthyite hysteria in the US. Lacking the courage of its convictions (and undoubtedly with an eye to increased box office sales) Carrey's character is shown to have been unfairly harassed because instead of being a communist he was simply a 'horny young man' following a lustful trail to a meeting at which he was unaware of the political content. Even today it seems that we can't have a hero in an American movie who is shown to have had any hint of a communist link in their past. The inhabitants of the town of Lawson where Carrey finds himself after his accident are all the sorts of wonderful people that we are supposed to believe are the real spirit of America. Supporters of the constitution one and all. Defenders of liberty and free speech. Funnily enough they seem to have been rather short on the ground during the McCarthy era and this is at the heart of the historical revisionism that I find most offensive in this movie. For me the biggest joke though (and presumably unintentional) are the scenes where Carrey as the scriptwriter has to endure meetings where his scripts are radically altered by greedy studio executives to make them more marketable. "There won't be dry eye in the house" says one of them after suggesting a cynically saccharine manipulation of one of the scripts. The irony of all this is that the script for this movie seems to have been written by just such a committee.
Review of The Majestic
