Director: Frank Darabont
Cast: Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, David Ogden Stiers
Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. There was something always romantic about throwing away everything that had been holding you down before and just running the neighborhood movie theater for the rest of your days (I know… I know…) but like with most people, the movie sort of disappeared from my mind.
Did I Like It: This movie exists in a weird nether-region. It is unashamedly patriotic, and one would think it lucked out and came out at a brief, relatively impossible to predict moment where the national mood was similarly patriotic, but somehow it landed with an absolutely thud. Darabont’s other films didn’t exactly do gangbusters at the box office, but found their audiences later on after repeated airings on cable. TNT didn’t want anything to do with this film?
It’s a barely remembered footnote in Darabont’s career*, especially coming off of two of the more transcendent Stephen King adaptations in the canon, but it has that same trait that made those two earlier films such a success. It’s unabashedly the kind of movie that Frank Capra would make, if he were still making films in the 1990s or 2000s.
And still, America wants nothing to do with the film, TNT wants nothing to do with the film, and even I kind of lost track of the thing over the years. Why? Maybe some people were turned off by dramatic turn from Carrey that doesn’t default to his normal antics (even The Truman Show (1998), probably his best performance, has him occasionally tapping into the energies which made him a star in the first place), but I certainly wasn’t. I think it might be more to do with the fact that for all of its charms, it has none of the transcendent moments that made The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) the classics they were.
It’s just a nice little movie, and when you judge those by comparison, there’s always a bit lacking.
*By the way: Why doesn’t he get to work anymore? He gets booted from after making in my mind the only watchable episodes of The Walking Dead, Mob City doesn’t capture the imagination, and then he’s gone forever? The man made Shawshank and we just have no use for him? Now that I type that, I wonder if there is some larger problem keeping his work from us. Maybe I don’t want to know.