'MAJESTIC' UNSPOOLS A TALE OF INCREDULITY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

You know a movie is in trouble when the most believable thing about it is Jim Carrey's performance.

``The Majestic'' is Frank Darabont's latest and least convincing wallow in unexamined nostalgia. Unmoored from his usual lifelines, Stephen King and a prison setting, the director of ``The Shawshank Redemption'' and ``The Green Mile'' goes overboard here. This is a movie that virtually tries to drown an audience in overpumped sentiment. And like the other Darabont films, it goes down awfully slow.

OK, no more watery metaphors; just wanted to give you an idea of how much of that the filmmaker will be dumping on you before he moves on to other, more inauthentic sets of symbols in this evocation of an ideal America that never was.

``The Majestic'' starts out beguilingly enough, making good fun of the type of cynical Hollywood lies it will eventually, celebratorily rely upon. Carrey's Peter Appleton is sitting in a story meeting in some 1950s studio conference room. He's a screenwriter, but it's a bunch of unseen vulgarians who we hear floating awful ideas about how to make his next movie more ``compelling.'' Being fairly new to the game, Peter agrees that their boneheaded concepts are interesting; it's hard to say whether the ambitious careerist knows better or not.

But the apolitical Peter soon finds out that the House Un-American Activities Committee, in its tireless quest to root out Hollywood Communists, has his name on a list, and he'd better testify before the witch-hunters and give up names of his own if he wants to keep working. Drunk and despondent, he drives up the coast to get away from it all one rainy night, then falls off a bridge near a seaside town (see? water).

Miraculously surviving despite being unconscious, Peter awakens with amnesia. The residents of quaint, Victorian Lawson think the stranger looks familiar, and when the local movie theater operator Harry Trimble (Martin Landau) gets a gander, he instantly becomes convinced that Peter is his long lost son, Luke.

Like a questionably high number of young men from the little, isolated burg, Luke was last seen shipping out for World War II. His remains were never found, however, and against all logic the townsfolk quickly accept the clueless Peter as their collective survival miracle. No one buys into this more fervently than Harry, who's let his theater, the Majestic, fall into disused disrepair, but now wants to reopen it with his son's help. Confronted with a lot of love - especially from Luke's beautiful, if slightly skeptical, childhood sweetheart Adele (Laurie Holden from ``The X-Files'') - and with nothing else better to do, Peter gets into the whole palace of dreams regeneration scheme.

We wait ... and wait ... and wait ... for the inevitable shoes to drop, like Peter's memory returning or the HUAC catching up with the now seditious fugitive. While we're twiddling along, Darabont and his screenwriter friend Michael Sloane try to enwrap us in what they think are Capra-esque virtues. The small-town folks display their salt-of-the-earthiness, Hollywood manufactured myths help hurting people cope, righteous populism prepares a well-speechified condemnation of blowhard politicians' assault on bedrock American principles ... and David Tattersall photographs it all in a style that's best described as high postcard romanticism.

But even Frank Capra called much of his own work Capra-corn, and his best movies, such as ``It's a Wonderful Life'' and ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,'' were made of much sterner stuff than Darabont dares to address. Jimmy Stewart went through true psychic hell in both of the earlier films; the best thing Carrey does here - and it is a genuine accomplishment, considering the extreme energy he naturally brings to his movie work - is sustain a kind of puzzled reactiveness as Peter.

Sloane's loopy conflation of war-related tragedy, movie magic and government overbearance is pretty puzzling in itself, and whatever he and Darabont are trying to say with all of this is, at best, unclear, and at worst, an outright lie. No small town was ever this forgiving, no blacklist story turned out this triumphal and - whatever other falsehoods we may fall for or even cherish - few Americans are as gullible as ``The Majestic'' wants to think we are.

By the way, the fervently fooled town idea was done fast, smart and with hysterical satiric insight by Preston Sturges' ``Hail the Conquering Hero'' - and right in the middle of World War II, when our fathers no doubt realized that life was too short and precarious to waste time on bogus inspiration when they could get a good laugh at themselves.

``THE MAJESTIC''

(Rated PG: language)

The stars: Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, David Ogden Stiers, James Whitmore, Amanda Detmer.

Behind the scenes: Directed and produced by Frank Darabont. Written by Michael Sloane. Released by Warner Bros.

Running time: Two hours, 28 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Two and one half stars

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Photo:

Jim Carrey, left, with Martin Landau and Jeffrey DeMunn, loses his memory but gains new friends in ``The Majestic.''