by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
I don't say this about many movies, but I am really hoping there's a sequel to The Truman Show. The concept of the movie (in case you missed the commercials and the trailers) is that Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is the star of the world's most popular TV show -- where his whole entire life is being filmed and broadcast worldwide to a slack-jawed group of voyeurs, 24 hours a day, around the clock. At the end of the movie -- I promise you, I'm not giving away any plot points -- Truman reaches the end of the impossibly gigantic soundstage and leaves forever.
And wouldn't that be a cool sequel? You have this man who has been trapped in a 1950's sitcom hell for his whole entire life. He escapes to find that he's monumentally popular, but with no idea whatsoever how to function in normal life. Hey, it might not be that great, but it would probably be better than The Truman Show.
The heart of The Truman Show is the show-within-a-show that's broadcast via satellite on one of those 500 channels we're all supposed to have one day. We see a lot of the TV show in the movie. In fact, great big chunks of the movie appear in what might be called Trumanvision -- from hidden cameras placed in odd or oblique places. (Would they really need a camera in the back of a vending machine?) Truman Burbank is an insurance salesman (we never see him do a lick of work, though) who lives a thouroughly hum-drum, drab and normal life on an island off the Florida coast which he can never leave. The most colorful thing about him is his clothes -- tweed jackets worn over sweaters worn over brightly colored striped shirts, with odd-looking plaid casual wear -- all presumably available for purchase in the Truman Show catalogue.
The mantra of sitcom creation is that your characters have to be likeable. I don't myself agree with this approach -- see Seinfeld and the better British comedies for examples -- but its the path that the creators of The Truman Show have taken. Truman is utterly, totally, likeable in every way, and it's just disgusting. You'd think that with Carrey playing the role of Truman, there's be some satiric comic edge to the character -- but there just isn't for most of the movie. There just doesn't seem to be enough comedy or drama in the script to sustain the TV show as entertainment. We see people around the world caught up in the show -- there's even a theme bar for some reason -- but with no understanding of how or why anyone would be able to watch the show. And because the TV show takes up so much of the movie's running length, the movie ends up being flat and unentertaining as well.
The Truman Show, like any poorly-written TV-show, suffers from what might be called Jessica Fletcher's Disease. Anyone who's watched Murder, She Wrote can tell you about this evil sickness: there'll be a point in the plot where the murderer is supposedly unmasked, and Angela Lansbury will say, "Well, there's still something bothering me." What's bothering her, of course, is that there's still twenty minutes left to the end of the show. Just as Murder, She Wrote must end with the murderer being caught, The Truman Show must end with Truman figuring out his predicament and escaping. Which it does, but it takes forever, and there isn't much of anything along the way to compensate for the long, drawn out ending.
You want comedy? Well, outside of Truman's wardrobe, there isn't much of that. Carrey has a couple of moments where he's loopily staring into the hidden camera behind his bathroom mirror, and he has a frenzied escape-attempt scene that looks like it was penciled in to showcase his manic style briefly. Laura Linney plays Truman's wife, Meryl, whose frozen-faced features highlight her role as part-time wife, part-time infomercial hostess: she's funny, if you think annoying is funny.
You want drama? There's a couple of decent dramatic scenes in The Truman Show, but they don't seem to mesh. Without giving away plot points, they come one right on top of the other and involve major changes in his family structure. We jump from this to an interview with Ed Harris, the show's creator, who interjects a long defense of the show and his place as Truman's protector. And then we jump back to the show... which continues as before, with Truman seemingly unaffected by all the turmoil in his life in the past twelve hours.
If there's no comedy, and little drama, why see The Truman Show? Maybe there's a message or something, like there was in writer/producer Andrew Niccol's previous work, the lifeless genetic fantasy Gattaca. In Gattaca, like The Truman Show, Niccol comes up with a great movie concept but does a lackluster job of fleshing it out and making it real. As Gattaca plods on to its inevitable resolution, it leaves us with a message -- don't discriminate against people based on their genetic coding. Fair enough. The message from The Truman Show is... what? It's not nice to imprison people on soundstages and transmit their lives?
I know there are people out there who loved this movie. Fine. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Me, I'm waiting for the sequel, and I hope that it's better than The Truman Show. It would almost have to be.
Rating: C+
-- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
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