RISE OF A HOLLYWOOD PHONY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THE USUAL COMPLAINTS about Hollywood - stars are brats, commerce humiliates artists, the movie audience is willfully clueless - get a high-tech makeover in ``Simone.'' But they remain the same old cliches underneath the smooth, digitized surface.

The latest directorial effort from ``The Truman Show'' screenwriter Andrew Niccol, ``Simone'' lacks much of the poker-faced elegance that distinguished Peter Weir's film. And despite its up-to-the-minute premise, ``Simone'' comes off as retro as ``Truman'' proved to be prescient. Where ``Truman'' foresaw the pop-culture decay that has led us to the era of ``The Anna Nicole Show,'' this effort often plays like a frantic update of ``The Day of the Locust.''

This is what happens when you leave an actor as restless as Al Pacino to his own devices. With only a computer-program cipher to play off of in many scenes, Pacino's natural tendency to chew his way through a script has little to stop it. This wouldn't be a bad performance, really - except when he's given Academy Awards for it instead of his better-nuanced work, it's usually fun to watch Al bluster his way through a movie - if Niccol's writing were more disciplined and imaginative. As it stands, this movie takes an exceptionally long time to make fun of some pretty obvious points.

Pacino's Viktor Taransky was once a respected, Cassavetes-like director who is now paying the price for selling out to corporate Hollywood. Nicola Anders (an uncredited but spot-on Winona Ryder), the star of his latest puerile romance, quits midproduction because - original - her trailer isn't big enough.

As a result, Taransky is kicked out of his studio contract (directors still have studio contracts?) by none other than his ex-wife, production chief Elaine Christian (Catherine Keener, inevitably). With only their young daughter Lainey (Evan Rachel Wood) providing any kind of moral support, Taransky is at the lowest point of his career when a loony, terminally ill software writer (Elias Koteas) offers him a program called Simulation One. Taransky soon discovers that Sim One (or Simone, get it?), can generate a perfectly believable blond beauty that, unlike a flesh- and-blood actress, he can manipulate to his heart's content.

Claiming his new discovery is a recluse, Taransky surreptitiously inserts Simone into several movies, each of which becomes a bigger hit than the last. Pretending to be her spokesman and Svengali gooses his career and turns him into a celebrity in his own right. Better, Taransky gets a big, playing-God charge out of controlling every aspect of Simone's performances.

But massive success attracts intrusive attention and increasing expectations, and soon keeping the truth hidden and managing his creation's image consumes Taransky. Even when revealing the whole scam appears to be the only sane way out, the star-worshiping public and media won't accept it. The illusion ends up wagging the mythmaker.

Could it happen? Not this way. Sure, Niccol is working an exaggerated metaphor here, as he did for ``Truman.'' Yet the film has so many alternately languid (Al alone with that computer screen) and hackneyed (Nicola comes crawling back, willing to do anything to work with Viktor again) stretches, your mind naturally starts picking apart its plot logic. In this oversaturated age of behind-the-scenes show-biz reporting, how could this ruse possibly go on as long as it does? What comglomerate's studio would indulge Taransky's control over such a valuable asset? And who has ever seen entertainment reporters show up at press conferences so uniformly well-dressed?

OK, I'm being too literal about a film whose one great strength is its virtual virtuosity. Simone, who is fundamentally a model (Canadian newcomer Rachel Roberts), has been impressively reconstituted by several computer effects houses into a pixel-perfect fantasy figure. She's just inhumanly beautiful enough to make you want her to be real, which in this scenario is the highest achievement imaginable.

If only ``Simone's'' comic perceptiveness were equally state of the art.

SIMONE - Two and one half stars

(PG-13: language)

Starring: Al Pacino, Catherine Keener, Evan Rachel Wood, Winona Ryder, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Elias Koteas, Rachel Roberts.

Director: Andrew Niccol.

Running time: 1 hr. 57 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Labored Hollywood satire in which a computer-generated actress becomes such a superstar that no one believes she's fake.