The Majestic (2001)

There are a lot of achingly earnest themes in this strange, long story set in 1951 about a Hollywood screenwriter with amnesia in a small town where everyone agrees he's the long-lost soldier son of the man who owns the local movie house. Yet it's exactly The Majestic's naked fetishism that makes this so fascinating a failed project. Martin Landau plays the father who wants to believe, and Jim Carrey plays it straight as the amnesiac writer, a variation on the performer's own conflicted desires to conceal and reveal himself.

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