Flak Magazine: Review of Simone, 9-6-02

Imagine, if you will, a well-written magazine feature — in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, wherever. It's on a relatively current cultural phobia, like cloning or airplanes or computer progress. The subhead and photo caption announce a clear, succinct thesis, one that gets followed through in detail for the next few dozen pages (maybe it's a quarterly with space to spare). There are no digressions, just a well-spelled-out argument in pleasant prose, taking about two hours to read.

Satisfying? Sure. But not when it's a movie.

Writer/director Andrew Niccol's latest work, Simone, plays more like an essay than a fleshed-out film and suffers greatly for it. Niccol, whose issues-oriented approach served him well in writing The Truman Show and writing and directing Gattaca, now takes on the idea of computer-generated actors. It's one of those great technological changes that holds a built-in sense of foreboding for those who love to e-mail but don't know where their attachments go to — the over-40s. These are the people who maybe read something a while back in Newsweek about some computer game movie with an animated girl with flowing hair. Or something?

But films for the educated 40-plus crowd fight an uphill battle. Their target audience attends as few as one or two films per year, complaining (understandably) that the film industry (understandably) shoots more for teens. Instead, these Borders Café customers fill up their media quota with magazines and cable news. Films that want to catch them need to keep their concepts high and simple — no shades of gray, no diversions from making their point. Wag the Dog, for instance. The approach may be good in the spare-the-comma, active-sentence world of journalism, but it doesn't make a good movie. Movies need complications and obstacles — fresh ones, not just the same obstacle repeated.

Simone's trailer gives away all three acts of the main story, a front-loading method common in marketing. What's uncommon is that that's all the movie is — three plot points. Al Pacino, as a control freak director, inherits a secret computer-generated actress from a fan (bing). She's a hit (bing). Her stardom gets out of his control (bing). This all just happens, like a boulder rolling downhill, but without any sense of danger. Pacino has to keep verbally reminding the audience of fraud, because there's no sense that he couldn't just come clean at any moment.

The subplots, if they can be called that, are never more than a half a step away. Catherine Keener is an increasingly jealous ex-wife/studio boss. Pruitt Taylor Vince is an increasingly obsessed tabloid editor. Other than that, Simone is just a series of variations on people wanting to meet the title character. While some of these keep the film rolling, such as when Rebecca Romijn-Stamos shows up as a stand-in looking to get intimate with Simone through Pacino, most of the film devolves into Weekend at Bernie's Goes to Hollywood. "I talked with someone I couldn't have, and they agree with me" has been done too many times already.

Some interesting details and stylistic choices hold up this bare bones essay-as-film, however, making the film at the very least pleasant for the under-40s. Pacino, Keener and Vince fit comfortably into their roles (Keener especially, reprising her studio suit role from Death to Smoochy), but they never goes beyond comfortable. Niccol gives the film a nice visual style, with black costumes set against a beige-and-white world, and even plays with Gattaca's memorable visual style in Simone's second film. The director also shows a good sense of Hollywood promotion, making magazine covers and billboards seem bigger than life, but never satirically out of place.

None of it is enough, though, to make Simone as interesting as it should be. Niccol never explores the side issues. Simone must have some kind of basic artificial intelligence to choose the proper facial expressions and voice tone to simultaneously mimic Pacino, but we never see it. Pacino's character is a consummate artist, yet his greatest works seems to be as a PR rep. And, in a film about celebrity and media hype, the media is relegated to the form of a cheap "Nightline" clone. Simone is a good germ of an idea, but would have benefited greatly from one of the interfering studio note-givers Niccol lampoons.

— Andy Ross (apross@earthlink.net)