THE TRUMAN SHOW
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A man lives his life not realizing
that he is on television and an audience of
millions watches his every move. But the game is
starting to slip and Truman is beginning to guess
that reality is not what he thinks it is. Jim
Carrey stars in an old science fiction idea that is
new to films. After several years Peter Weir
returns to the weird. Rating: 9 (0 to 10), +3 (-4
to +4) SPOILER WARNING: The premise of THE TRUMAN
SHOW is told in all of the trailers, but it is not
fully revealed until well into the film. This
review does discuss that premise.
There was a time when Australian Peter Weir made strange and quirky films like THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS, THE PLUMBER, and THE LAST WAVE. But Weir lost that level of creativity at some point. His films were more professional and perhaps more polished, but they were closer to Hollywood fare. At most they had just a small whiff of the strange his earlier films had. It has been a long time since Weir made a film as enthralling philosophically as THE TRUMAN SHOW. Weir looks at the media and what it is doing to both the viewer and the person under media scrutiny. The film also takes a playful look at the relationship between humanity and God.
Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) is now thirty and through his whole life he has been off-camera only in his most private moments. In some unspecified number of years, in the future people all over the world tune in to watch THE TRUMAN SHOW and track how his life is progressing. As sort of a cross between AN AMERICAN FAMILY and CANDID CAMERA, "The Truman Show" follows one character through his every day and even his every move. Truman has no idea that he is being watched. If he knew it would spoil the entire project. And a phenomenal investment has been put into creating the huge domed studio the size of a town with cameras everywhere to relay to the world everything that happens to Truman.
The whole project is the brainchild of the godlike producer Christof (Ed Harris). No effort has been spared to build the unbelievable domed studio or to ingrain phobias into Truman so that he is afraid to stray too far from his home. As part of the latter effort we see a visit to a travel agent who has decorated her office with marvelous anti-travel posters. Christof has programmed nearly everything that has ever happened to Truman. Christof has cast the important people in Truman's life including his supposed parents and his wife Meryl (Laura Linney of TALES OF THE CITY). Meryl's responsibilities include keeping Truman in line and unsuspecting, delivering charming commercials for sponsors' products placed into Truman's world, and above all to keep smiling. But things are getting a little difficult for Meryl as Christof's production staff gets a little sloppy: lights fall from a clear sky and supposedly dead characters from Truman's past find their way back onto the show set. Truman is starting to get suspicious that there is something not right about his reality.
Does Jim Carrey do a good job of playing Truman Burbank? That is a very difficult question to answer. At first brush it would seem not. Carrey is his usual weird and does his trademarked brand of clowning around. Is this the way someone raised on camera with scripted experience would behave? Probably not, but it is unclear how he would behave. He almost certainly would lean to some form of weird. Whether this is one way he could be weird is hard to tell. The constantly smiling Laura Linney is at first charming and quickly becomes grating, but again these are unusual circumstances. She would not behave like an actress because this is like almost no acting job has ever been. She would have to be constantly improvising and be onstage 16 to 24 hours a day, year in and year out. Her role would have to be her primary life. Perhaps her little Stepford wife is precisely what would result. Rounding out the major characters is Ed Harris as the de facto god of Truman's world. Harris takes his role in a quiet understated manner and does a fine job.
I would have loved to have seen THE TRUMAN SHOW cold, having no idea what the film was about. Unfortunately the ads give much too much away. There is a slow build to where the viewer is told the information in the trailer. Much of the mystery of Andrew Niccol's script (as complex as his script for GATTACA) is lost. One of the big holes, however, is that this is a much less believable story if taken literally rather than as allegory. One must believe that there are thousands of actors in Truman's world who are just waiting months or years to be cued. There are probably parts of Truman's town that he never visits, but the actors have to be prepared if he does. Fantastic preparedness must be arranged for contingencies that probably will never occur. In addition, the number of cameras needed to produce THE TRUMAN SHOW must be literally phenomenal. At one point Christof estimates that 5000 cameras are used to cover all the places that Truman might possibly go. A little back of the envelope calculation will show that figure has got to be orders of magnitude low without a fair risk of losing Truman. The town as shown must be about nine square miles and then Truman goes off into the woods in the course of the film. The logistics of setting up and running this pseudo-town seem more and more complex the more one thinks about them. But again, this is more a religious allegory than a science fiction story to be taken literally. Niccol has a lot of fun playing with the various features of the artificial sky as a recurrent theme in the film, but also giving the film a sort of medieval cosmology.
Music is by Burkhart (von) Dallwitz and seems to consist mostly of easy listening and classical music on a sort of celestial, New Age theme. The idea for THE TRUMAN SHOW is one that has been done in science fiction several times previously. Then there are ideas borrowed from other sources like the 60s TV show THE PRISONER. I would rate THE TRUMAN SHOW an 8 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. This is Weir's best film since THE LAST WAVE by a wide margin.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1998 Mark R. Leeper
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