 Simone is a cautionary hollywood satire about the first
computer-generated movie star. A composite of vocal intonations and body
parts from a gallery of famous leading ladies as well as a blend of
apparently every supermodel on the planet, the alluring "synthespian" Simone
is a glossy, soulless pastiche. This explains why the public isn't
suspicious of her. After all, what's to distinguish her from all the glossy,
soulless real actors out there? Writer-director Andrew Niccol throws
around a lot of intriguing ideas in this film, and even though his ambitions
are more expansive than his talent, he's managed to come up with something
that credibly resembles the shape of things to come, Hollywood-style.
Fortunately, Simone has as its real-life star one of the most
flesh-and-blood of all actors, Al Pacino, who plays Viktor Taransky, the
movie director who unleashes Simone on a world that has no inkling she's not
real.
Taransky is a legendary, Oscar-nominated auteur on the skids. When his female
star (Winona Ryder, in a cameo) walks off his new film in mid-production,
he's rescued by a dying computer geek (Elias Koteas) who bequeaths him the
software to create the 3-D Simone. Recast in the lead, she becomes
Hollywood's hottest star; she even introduces her own line of perfume,
which, in the movie's terms, is an achievement on par with her winning an
Oscar. (That sounds about right.) The fact that no one has actually seen
Simone -- she never appears in public or even on the set with the other
actors -- is explained by her Garbo-esque reclusiveness. As her fame blooms,
Viktor has to come up with ever-more-byzantine ruses to keep the public, and
the snooping press, at bay. Even when he attempts to spill the beans and
clear up his frantic life, no one wants to believe him. And even if people
did believe him, would they care? Stardom is stardom; whether it has a
heartbeat is secondary.
On one level, Simone rebukes an industry ruled by the insane demands
of movie stars. Why should directors have to endure the tantrums of prima
donnas when they can be replaced by holograms? Simone is also a
not-so-thinly-veiled
attack on movie audiences (and movie journalists) for their goggle-eyed
gullibility. But Niccol isn't a very good scourge, perhaps because he's more
intrigued than mortified by all the computerization he's spewing forth.
He's been down this road before, in The Truman Show, which he wrote,
and in his writing-directing debut, Gattaca, which was about a
futuristic society of genetically "perfect" people. Niccol's sympathy for
the unabashedly human types in these movies never quite rings true, because
he's captivated by the possibilities of the real in the synthetic. The
computer-generated Simone may be soulless, but that's part of her pizzazz
(as it is with so many supermodels). Compared with her, the other characters
in the movie, with the vast exception of Viktor, are paper-thin.
Niccol tries to turn the movie into a comedic saga of redemption: Viktor
comes back from the brink to reclaim not only his career but also his
adoring teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and his ex-wife (Catherine
Keener), who runs the studio he works for. This sunniness isn't very
convincing. Viktor has so much messy energy that conventional happiness
doesn't sit too well with him. He needs craziness in order to be sane. I
suppose Pacino is miscast as a famous movie director -- he doesn't look like
giving orders is an integral part of his psyche -- but that doesn't really
matter here. What matters is the yin-yang that Niccol sets up between the
hypercool Simone and this dark dervish of worry. As an exemplar of actors
with a pulse, Pacino is peerless. (1 hr. 33 mins.; PG-13) — PETER RAINER
Opens August 23
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Showtimes & tickets (movietickets.com)
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