Simone
is Made Up of Ones and Zeroes, Mostly Zeroes Simone
is Made Up of Ones and Zeroes, Mostly ZeroesSimone is a movie that will probably be praised by a majority of critics, but I just didn't buy it for one minute. Not for one second! The film is a farce, but one that never creates its own reality where the farce can really work. I found myself questioning the movie the whole time I was watching it, and ultimately I just couldn't "go" with where it wanted to take me.
That said, this is a highly ambitious movie. Simone was actually a movie I was looking forward to seeing based on its really intriguing premise. Al Pacino plays Victor Taransky, a once-popular film director now desperate for a hit. His latest picture is threatened by the untimely departure of its neurotic star (played by Winona Ryder) over "creative differences." The argument between filmmaker and starlet becomes so heated that Ryder will not allow her likeness to appear in the final film.
What is Victor to do?
Along comes a mysterious software designer (Elias Koteas), who gives Victor a computer disc that he swears will solve all of his problems. The disc contains the Sim One program, which is able to call upon a massive database of great actresses from cinema's past to believably create a digital actress who can be seamlessly placed into scenes already filmed. Victor is able to finish his film, and the result is a box-office hit due largely to the debut performance of the gorgeous lead named Simone.
Sounds like Teddy's kind of movie, right? Well, yes and no. I love films that seek to give me a behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood and all of its egos and power struggles, triumphs and defeats. But the more you know about Hollywood, the movie business, and how things work, the less this film makes any sense.
The problem is writer-director Andrew Niccol tries to do too much and ultimately loses control of the story. If he had just kept it to Victor using Simone (who is really model Rachel Roberts) to complete his film and then having to dodge the press after the movie became a hit, that would have been fine. But the second half of this movie is so over-the-top ridiculous that most of the audience just sits there agape voicing logic questions back at the screen.
Simone's public demands that she do additional movies, interviews, and appearances. Victor never lets anyone in on the scam, so he has to do ALL of this himself. This includes multiple magazine covers, a remote interview with a 20/20-like program, another film in which NONE of the actors are allowed to be in the same scene with her, and a giant concert in front of thousands in which old Victor must make use of a Simone hologram, lasers, and smoke effects (all by himself, keep in mind) and still make sure no one is allowed backstage.
Victor's excuse is that Simone has a phobia about being around other people. But come on! You can't book a major concert venue and expect to have not one single person be backstage while you are in a truck outside the concert operating the computer technology. You couldn't convince a set of real Hollywood actors to appear in a movie where the flesh-and-blood lead will not do any scenes with them. How do you dupe the cinematographer, the make-up artists, the payroll department, the insurers. Victor controls every aspect of his movies from a single building on a studio backlot that has only ONE guard who apparently never takes breaks.
It's just too much.
At one point, to convince his ex-wife and studio executive Elaine Christian (Catherine Keener), Victor drives a car from the passenger side, manipulates a Simone mannequin in the driver's seat, all the while operating software that allows his voice to sound like Simone's over a cell phone. At the end of the scene, Elaine drives away convinced she just talked to Simone (Elaine is an imbecile, by the way) but Victor crashes. The film then skips forward days later and doesn't show how Victor is able to explain his way out of a pileup on the Hollywood Freeway.
And that is to say nothing of the entertainment media portrayed in this film. At one point, tabloid journalists Pruitt Taylor Vance and Jason Schwartzmann do find out that Victor used a digital background to fool an on-air interviewer who thought he was talking to the real Simone. At that point, the two characters should have been able to put two-and-two together, and Victor's world should start crashing down. But NO! They never really "get" it, and it's frustrating.
Oh, and that on-air interview is particularly hard to watch because the CGI Simone character is supposed to mimic whatever movements Victor makes back in his private computer room. If Victor moves his hand and rubs his nose, Simone on screen moves her hand and rubs her nose. But when the signal starts to distort, Victor starts to work furiously on the keyboard ... yet Simone doesn't mimic his frantic movements. She stays perfectly still in her chair.
As my grandmother used to rage whenever something wouldn't make sense, "Poppycock!" This movie is just ridiculous. Victor simply is called upon to keep too many balls in the air. I mean, jeez, the film calls for him to fool every single person on the planet. I would have found Simone a touch more believable if he was able to pull off his elaborate hoaxes with the help of even a couple of people who also knew. Like a loyal secretary, a greedy studio boss, a nerdy computer whiz from ILM.
I know what Niccol was going for here. Some will feel he reached his goal with a madcap farce that also warns of us that the American public is not too far off from being fooled for real by today's increasingly life-like CGI creations. In the end, Simone just doesn't compute.
Simone is rated PG-13.
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