In Simone: Missing an actress, Pacino gets creative

Aside from being the funniest movie of the year, Simone, Andrew Niccol’s brilliant anti-Hollywood satire, has a wickedly eccentric enchantment to it.

The acerbic Niccol, who previously wrote and directed the Orwellian film Gattaca (1997) and penned the clever screenplay for Jim Carrey’s The Truman Show (1998), has obviously made a career out of blurring the line between what’s real and what’s fake. He is so obsessed with the creepy artificiality permeating modern life that it was only a matter of time before he tackled the leader of contemporary chicanery – the movie industry, with all its misguided devotion to the power of illusion and false advertising.

Highly stylized and deeply cynical, Niccol’s Simone is essentially a reworking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein legend – or George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion or Mannequin – with a pinch of both Mel Brooks The Producers and The Wizard of Oz.

It tells the story of Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino at his harried best), a filmmaker of incredible bad luck and with such eclectic tastes that all of his films have been flops. His one last chance is a movie titled Sunrise, Sunset, which got the green light only because Viktor’s ex-wife, Elaine Christian (Catherine Keener), is a big executive at the major studio producing it. But disaster strikes when his female lead, Nicola Anders (a witty inversion of the director’s name), pulls a diva and walks off the set.

Nicola is played to the hilt by Winona Ryder, whose grasp on her character’s assorted quirks and idiosyncrasies seems a little too comically authentic. Ryder, in what amounts to a glorified cameo, has only a few minutes of screen time, but within that limited time she does a devastating deconstruction of movie-star vapidity.

Anyway, with Nicola gone, the movie is shut down – and Viktor’s career, or what’s left of it, is seemingly ruined. But then he has a fateful, almost other-worldly encounter with a man named Hank Aleno (Elias Koteas), a software genius who happens to be dying and who, as a last act of generosity, leaves Viktor a computer program he devised that makes it possible to create synthetic actors – or "synthespians." Viktor is intrigued and, fiddling with Aleno’s invention, he creates a virtual actress – blond, beautiful and completely malleable and obedient.

Her computer name is Simulation One, but for the adoring public waiting to discover her, Viktor shortens it to Simone. Taking the existing footage of Sunrise, Sunset, Viktor cuts out Nicola and inserts pixilated images of Simone into all of her scenes. Finally, Viktor has found an actress who will follow his every directive – an actress so beautifully blank that everyone in the audiences can project anything they want onto her. Sunrise, Sunset is a huge hit. The world can’t get enough of Simone.

Viktor, realizing he’s onto something here, scuttles his plans to reveal the truth – that he is the master behind a puppet – and parlays it into something even bigger. He devises an entire off-screen persona for Simone, one based on intense privacy. She’s like a modern Garbo, but Viktor takes it one step further. No one ever gets to meet or even see Simone.

Viktor turns the promotion of Simone – or rather himself – into an art. She gives only closed-circuit interviews from secret places, for example, and each time she sings the praises of her great director, Viktor Taransky. She’d much rather talk about Viktor than herself. The co-stars for Simone’s new movie are advised by Viktor that she works in a "special way" – that they will never actually see her or perform with her – and when she meets them via a television broadcast, she tells them to simply listen to Viktor and do whatever he says.

"Just because I have a new movie opening on Friday," she tells one interviewer in her inimitable monotone, "doesn’t mean everyone should care about my life" – a line that had me thinking about Gwyneth Paltrow, who has been all over the place lately, talking about "me, myself and I" while doing promotions for Possession (which opens here in a week).

Meanwhile, Viktor comes off like Frank Morgan as the great wizard in The Wizard of Oz. But instead of hiding behind a curtain and a screen, he sits behind a huge computer console on a stark, empty soundstage, punching in commands and even talking for Simone, his voice disguised electronically.

But then his creation threatens to get out of hand, and Viktor plans to ruin Simone by having her direct herself in a really horrendous, pretentious film, a surefire flop (a la Springtime for Hitler in The Producers. But by then it’s too late. Simone can do no wrong.

As in real life, it is only a matter of time before Simone is hawking her own perfume and doing concert tours and winning awards. There are any number of hilarious zingers aimed at Hollywood and movie-fan idolatry. One of the funniest has a TV news anchor announcing the big stories of the day – an imminent world war, rampant poverty and starvation in some Third World Country, brutality in the streets – only to add, "But overshadowing all of this was today’s announcement of the Oscar nominations!"

Pacino carries the film with his wizened humanity, ably abetted by the ever-jaded Keener – and by Simone. While the studio releasing the film insists she’s actually a virtual actress, the Hollywood Reporter recently outed Canadian model Rachel Roberts as the prototype for the character. Roberts is listed among the people thanked in the end credits, along with the likes of Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and others, bits and pieces of whom were probably used for Simone. Simone is 90 percent computer generated but she looks so real even on the wide screen and credit should be given to the special effects team.

Mary J. Blige is also listed, presumably for providing Simone’s singing voice. And what does she sing? What do you think? (You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman. What else?

(Note: Joe Baltake is a movie critic of Sacramento Bee a newspaper in Sacramento, California.)