SIMONE (Andrew Niccol, 2002)

Reviewed: August 26, 2002

Simone can best be equated to an injured deer lying on the side of the road. The deer has been hit by a car; it's whimpering in pain and bleeding profusely. You know the animal is on death's doorstep so you take out your handgun and shoot it in its head. Oh, how I wanted to pump a round of bullets into Simone's brain. Oh, how I wanted to put this abject failure out of its misery.

Writer/director Andrew Niccol (who wrote The Truman Show, and wrote and directed the underrated Gattaca) takes his mildly amusing, vaguely promising premise -- a director (Al Pacino) who is frustrated with overly demanding divas uses a computer-generated actress as the lead in his new film; nonexistent actress skyrockets into the pop-cultural stratosphere -- and runs it into the ground. Simone is one-note, goes nowhere very, very slowly (it's two hours long and has the plotting to reasonably cover less than a third of that length), and completely implausible (the gigantic montage leaps are the epitome of lazy screenwriting). If Niccol thinks his film asks any questions about technology's place in our current cinematic climate, he's sorely mistaken. Instead, all we get is a series of repetitions: First the press and public wants to see Simone, then Simone is fabricated in some capacity, then she's shown to said press and public. Repeat, repeat, repeat. There is no imagination at work, no effort from Niccol to take his story anywhere at all, let alone any place interesting or daring (although he introduces a stupid, nonsensical murder plot towards the end).

The tepid jokes and a worthless subplot involving Pacino's character's relationship with a studio head (Catherine Keener, as unsympathetic, brassy, and not versatile as ever) are difficult to endure, but most painful is watching Pacino do his damnedest to make the most of Niccol's astonishingly weak material. It's downright embarrassing to see one of cinema's greatest flounder about, earnestly yelling and going insanely over-the-top as he delivers tedious soliloquies to a computer monitor (and that's coming from a guy who adores Pacino's scenery-devouring performance in The Devil's Advocate). Not even a cameo from my beloved Winona Ryder can save this compost heap.

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