Review by Sean Healy
The Truman Show
Directed by Peter Weir
With Jim Carrey and Ed Harris
Now showing at cinemas everywhere
This is one film where you have to try to forget who the star is, and what he represents in Hollywood-land — this is not a typical slapstick Jim Carrey film. And forget about the way the movie is advertised too.
Peter Weir's The Truman Show has a very clear point of view. It shines a spotlight on how the media and Hollywood warp our perceptions of reality.
There is a history of such films. The 1970s' Network, starring Peter Finch ("I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore"), was one of the first and the hardest hitting. Just this year, there's been Wag the Dog, a film about how an embattled US president uses Hollywood technology to create a "war" to divert attention away from a sex scandal.
The Truman Show is about Truman, a 30-something, depressingly cheerful but otherwise ordinary suburbanite. He lives in a sea-side US town which exists nowhere outside of Disney fantasies and the advertising industry: all white wood-frame homes, picket fences, people saying "good morning" to each other.
He has a blonde, sickeningly sweet wife, a job as an insurance salesman and a beer-guzzling pal. His life is a 1990s' version of I Love Lucy, without the laughs.
Truman doesn't know it, but he is also the star of the world's highest rating soapie. Truman's whole life (he is the first person to be legally adopted by a corporation) has been observed by thousands of cameras in every nook and cranny of the town.
The whole town is just one enormous, self-contained, stunningly elaborate sound-stage. Everyone (from his wife and his mother to the guy who sells him his morning newspaper) is an actor playing a part.
His life since birth has been televised 24 hours a day to the masses: his first steps; his first day at school; his first kiss; his marriage; his work life. The show's creators go to enormous lengths to defeat any desire he may develop to leave his small world, supposedly situated on an island.
Rather than being a solipsist's dreamland ("yes, the world really does revolve around me"), the show is a prison, a gilded, comfy, white-picket cage. The film is about how Truman comes to learn the truth of his existence and attempts to escape.
It sounds like a great idea for a film — the kind of great idea that Hollywood usually makes a hash of. Not in this case.
For Weir, Truman's life is a metaphor for our own. The news is filtered (and often created): when a floodlight falls near him, the next day's paper explains it away as debris from an airplane. Truman's relations with people are controlled: when he falls in love with an anonymous extra — departing from the script — she suddenly disappears on a "family trip to Fiji".
Inappropriate, dangerous thoughts and aspirations are elaborately and systematically discouraged (one scene shows a teacher saying to an eight-year-old Truman: "You can't be an explorer, everything's been discovered"). Sound familiar?
Forget about Jim Carrey. This film is definitely worth going to see.