FilmBlather.com

"A star is digitized!"

In making a movie about a director who fools the entire world with a computer-generated superstar, writer-director Andrew Niccol, it would seem, has pulled a fast one on the media himself. Everything I've read about Simone refers to it as a "Hollywood satire" and usually describes its failings as such. If this teaches us a lesson, it's that it is exceedingly easy to fail at something you aren't even remotely trying to accomplish. Indeed, Simone never for a second purports to satirize anything, and while it may not be as stunningly perceptive and powerful as The Truman Show for which Niccol wrote the script, it has an identical central theme.

It's also an awfully entertaining little ditty in its own right, lighthearted and unpretentious, which is probably what fooled people. Like Woody Allen's Hollywood Ending it begins with a director in the doldrums -- perhaps the end -- of his career. The star (Winona Ryder) of Victor Taranski's (Al Pacino) latest opus, which follows a series of big flops, walks out on him because her trailer is not the biggest on the lot. Then the studio head (Catherine Keener) -- also his ex-wife -- balks at renewing his contract. He's desperate, forlorn, ready to give up, when he's accosted by a guy he met at a convention nearly a decade ago. About to perish from an inoperable tumor in his eye, the man gives him a computer program that allows the user to create and control an amazingly lifelike computer-generated actress called Simulation One: Simone.

It is nine months later. Taranski has entirely replaced his petulant prima donna with Simone in every scene. The movie is screened, and the virtual actress is a gigantic hit, showered with hosannas from every imaginable medium. The problem? No one realizes that she isn't real. Beguiled by the prospect of the media attention and the opportunity to make more movies, Victor begins an elaborate ruse to make Simone appear to be merely an eccentric method actress who despises public appearances and refuses to be on set with her co-stars. The extremely versatile computer code allows Simone to mimic his voice in real-time; the scenes in which he is alone with the program, essentially talking to himself, are played for laughs but have a subtle poignancy.

Simone isn't concerned with "superficiality in Hollywood" or "technology in search of an artist," though it brushes on those issues. Niccol's field of interest, just as it was in The Truman Show is our inherent gullibility: we accept the reality with which we are presented. Just as Truman went over three decades without questioning his surroundings, attributing any strangeness to his own misperception, so no one in the entire world thinks to question the reality of this mysterious new star who appears out of nowhere. Most actors already receive "digital assistance" in their roles; how long until a completely digital star really is born. And will they tell us?

Since this time Niccol makes the entire world his stage, rather than just the psyche of one unfortunate dude, he is unable to provide the psychological depth that made Truman such a transcendent experience. By the end of the movie, the plot twists begin to seem completely arbitrary, with a worldwide audience wholeheartedly embracing Simone's directing debut, "I Am Pig." (This, as the advertising conveniently gives away, is one of Victor's attempts to destroy his virtual ingenue). Still, Niccol's instincts as a filmmaker are sharp, with all of the individual moments of satire serving his greater purpose. He has an eye for visuals, too; Victor's "office," consisting of an empty soundstage with a computer system in the middle is the epitome of isolation, and some of the sets late in the film are moodily futuristic, if somewhat bizarre.

It seems almost irrelevant that Simone is a gorgeous movie, as photographed by Edward Lachman (The Virgin Suicides) with beautifully-lit greens, golds and yellows. Similarly lost in the shuffle are great performances from the reliable Al Pacino and Catherine Keener, the latter quickly becoming one of my favorite character actresses (she's particularly adept at playing hard-edged businesswomen). Simone may technically be the weakest of Niccol's projects (besides Truman, he also wrote and directed the terrific Gattaca), but it's a remarkable movie nonetheless, if only for effectively burying its theme beneath a good red herring.