Hollywood's "Is" Girl
SIMONE
Andrew Niccol keeps playing with reality.
With Al Pacino, Rachel Roberts, Catherine Keener, Jay Mohr
Written and directed by Andrew Niccol
THE FRENCH FILM SCHOLAR Christian Metz called cinema the presence of an absence: light through celluloid that makes us believe we see things on a wall in front of us. But the American film director Viktor Taransky, portrayed in Andrew Niccol’s Simone by a wonderfully dark and effervescent Al Pacino, teaches an oblivious world that cinema can also be the absence of a presence.
In Wag the Dog, a Hollywood producer created a war to help a desperate president. The Truman Show, followed immediately by Pleasantville and EdTV, all played variations on the theme of media and reality. Is there a TV series that hasn’t done a mockumentary episode or an actor who hasn’t parodied his or her own persona? Anyone care to go Full Frontal? Or how about Being John Malkovich for a while?
So it’s hardly a surprise that Simone, written and directed by Andrew Niccol (who, no surprise, wrote The Truman Show), concerns a fading Hollywood art-film director who uses a computer program left to him by a mad genius to create a gifted, ravishing, munificent actress (she travels to war zones to help children) who becomes the impalpably evanescent toast of Tinseltown.
"Sensation" hardly describes the magic of Viktor’s alluring simulacrum, whose image is a portmanteau of Streep, Bacall, Hepburn (Audrey) and several other screen gems. Everyone wants to work with Simone, but nobody actually gets to because she insists on performing her scenes on an empty set. ("I relate better to people when they’re not actually there.") She wins two lead Oscar in the same year, one for the pretentiously tautological Eternity Forever, the other for a French Lieutenant’s Woman clone. "Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it," Viktor tells himself, as his precarious psyche begins to splinter, and as he falls in love with his own genius. And to his image of Simone, whose voice he creates by synthesizing his own, he confides: "I’m so relaxed around you, so myself."
First in Niccol’s Gattaca (as writer/director), then in Truman, and now in Simone, it’s all right there: An omnipotent figure who uses technology to control people’s lives - becoming, in each story, a genuine deus ex machina, and then some. But while, in The Truman Show, we wanted to see the central figure break free of his techno-captor - who can forget the moment when Truman hears the voice of God and then choose to ignore it? - in Simone, it’s the creation who holds her creator captive, and there’s no such liberating epiphany. So Niccol finally arrives at the most sanguine of endings, followed by one last blithely sardonic coda that reminds us of just how easy it is to fool all of the people, all of the time.
These two movies are intriguing mirrors of one another, only Simone is way funnier, with dry one-liners, some adroit pratfalls, and a hit-and-run rout of comedies, love stories, film noir, Hollywood ego and, for a brief moment, even The Godfather (behind a hearse, among a throng of mourners veiled in black, a phantom Michael Corleone’s briefly returns). Of course, it’s slightly silly to watch famous actors parodying their profession in a high-profile studio movie. Simone is probably the least of Niccol’s three films so far: Its dialogue occasionally feels too loaded and expository, as if written for mass consumption, and its themes have grown a little weary by now, despite how wittily Niccol conveys them.
Niccol has an uncanny ability to take a place that looks just like ours and make us believe we’re watching our evil twin. In Simone, he doesn’t dare try to explain how an artsy-fartsy filmmaker masters some impossible technology and then hides it from everyone in the whole wide world. He’s much more interested in words and ideas, so you can relax with his splendid comic timing and appreciate the consistency of his growing canon.
But deeper than his surface interest in spoofing the hand that feeds him, Niccol toys with the notion - terrifying in these modern times of information overload - that people get away with things because you can’t prove a negative. Tailed by two aporetic tabloid snoops (Pruitt Taylor Vince, Jason Schwartzman), Viktor maintains his illusion because it’s literally impossible for us to know every single thing at every single moment. At first his producer ex-wife (Catherine Keener, becoming tiresome in her familiar acerbic-bitch role) and his leading actor (Jay Mohr) claim to have met Simone because it’s the A-list thing to say. But eventually, just like everyone else - including Viktor’s sweetly jaded teen-age daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) - they succumb to the illusion because they simply can’t imagine that it’s not true.
As quick as Niccol’s wit and intellect can be, he might not have pulled this movie off without a performance like the one he gets from Pacino, whose comic deftness in Simone defies expectation. Under Niccol’s eerie direction - the world of Simone looks coolly post-apocalyptic and occasionally fascistic - Pacino beautifully tosses off some of the script’s drollest jokes. Watch Pacino’s face in those moments where Viktor forgets that Simone (depending on the context) is or isn’t real: His look of astonishment is so perfect that the key to believing in Simone becomes watching Pacino believe that Viktor believes that everyone believes that Simone is - well, that she just is.