THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998) A film review by Ivana Redwine Copyright 1998 by Ivana Redwine Starring: Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, Laura Linney as Meryl, Noah Emmerich as Marlon, Natascha McElhone as Lauren/Sylvia, Ed Harris as Christof. Directed by Peter Weir. Screenplay by Andrew Niccol. Cinematography by Peter Biziou.
There is a stunning scene in THE TRUMAN SHOW where Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey, in a breakthrough dramatic role) attempts to have a serious conversation with his wife Meryl (Laura Linney, who gives the role just the right touch of icy hypocrisy). He tries desperately to communicate, but his words do not dent the armor of her soul-numbing insincerity. As Truman tries to tear down her seemingly impenetrable facade, she reacts in a subtly horrifying, surreal manner--she suggests that Truman might like to try a new product called Mococoa and launches into a sales pitch for it. During her spiel, she holds up the product's package as if to an unseen camera. Like the rest of the film, this scene is slick, smart, and superbly realized, but Carrey's performance is what gives it its emotional core. His face reflects just the right mix of dismay, anger, and disbelief, as he slowly begins to understand that something is terribly wrong.
A rather similar scene a little later in the film also strikes a particularly moving emotional chord. Truman and his best friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich) spend an evening together, nursing a couple of beers while sitting on the end of an unfinished bridge. Although it sounds like pure paranoia, Truman tells Marlon, "Everybody seems to be in on it." But Marlon looks Truman straight in the eye and says convincingly, "I'm not in on it, Truman, because the last thing I would ever do is lie to you." However, it turns out that in spite of Marlon's seeming sincerity, he is getting his lines from an ear piece. At this moment, Truman does not yet know that Marlon is an actor. Everything Marlon has ever said or done around Truman all their lives has been a well-performed lie. I found this to be a powerful, memorable scene, and it struck me as yet another hard-hitting example of the tragic emotional toll on Truman as he slowly learns about the artificial world surrounding him. No matter what he tries, Truman cannot communicate with or get close to his family or friends because they are not what they seem. In this scene, the sadness in Truman's eyes is only a shadow of the devastation he will eventually feel when he realizes the extent to which he has been cruelly deceived by those he loves and trusts.
For almost 30 years, Truman Burbank has been unaware that he is the star of an uninterrupted, live television broadcast. It is the ultimate in reality programming. In addition to being the longest running show in history, it is also the most popular, with a devoted, world-wide audience. In fact, some of his more ardent fans get a feeling of reassurance from keeping the show on while Truman sleeps; but if his audience ever gave any thought to Truman's exploitation, they would need more than a television night light to keep their terror safe.
Without ever having committed a crime, Truman has been held captive his entire life in a man-made world that is enclosed within a huge dome, a structure so large that it can be seen from space. Within the dome is Seahaven Island, which is actually a huge stage set. Except for Truman, all Seahaven's citizens are actors. It is a created world with the verisimilitude of reality, and seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, ingeniously concealed cameras broadcast every aspect of Truman's life to a global village of vacuous voyeurs. In concept it is a cross between "Candid Camera" and the omnipresent, all-seeing eye of Big Brother in George Orwell's novel "1984."
I was particularly impressed with the satiric imagination that went into the design of Seahaven; it is a safe and sanitized utopian dream, a community seemingly conjured out of the plastic world of 1950s television comedies. The feel of Seahaven is similar to walking into the world that exists only within the frame of a Norman Rockwell illustration--a heartwarming place where the smiles seldom waver. Yet, on closer inspection, there is something unsettlingly saccharine and hollow about the conspicuous absence of the gritty, untidy realities of life.
A chilling aspect of the story is that Truman was adopted before his birth, not by surrogate parents, but by a corporation. Instead of being nurtured by parental love, Truman has been treated his whole life as if he were a commodity. Everything that surrounds him forms a matrix for product promotion, and he is kept in a place that is little more than a picturesque prison, while his free will is callously manipulated.
The puppet master pulling the strings of Truman's life is the television show's creator and director Christof (well played by Ed Harris)--a man so enraptured with his own creative vision that his arrogance and egotism make him blind to the moral implications of Truman's plight. I found Christof to be a brilliantly conceived and absolutely frightening character. The control that Christof holds over Truman's life and world is almost God-like--at one point he directs his crew to "Cue the sun!"-- but Cristof is a faux-deity whose vanity makes his blood run very cold. He is even cynical enough to go as far as to contrive events to instill fears in Truman that will keep him from leaving Seahaven Island. For example, Truman believes that when he was a small boy, he witnessed his father's drowning; but in actuality what appeared to be the drowning was merely a staged event, designed to make Truman fear the water.
At one point in the film, Christof makes a provocative statement: "We accept the reality with which we're presented." Few people have the kind of courage it takes to question the veracity of the world they are presented with, but when there are too many disturbing incidents for Truman to ignore, his faith in everything he has believed all his life begins to unravel. His first clue that something is rotten in Seahaven is when a stage light falls from the sky, nearly landing on top of him. Another time, something goes awry with his car radio, and he hears actors getting their instructions instead of the radio program that was on the air. On another occasion Truman finds a homeless man wandering around town who claims to be his father--the man Truman watched drown years ago and believed to be dead. Later in the film, a close inspection of Truman's wedding photo reveals his bride's fingers were crossed when the picture was taken.
But what finally makes Truman take action--spurring him on a quest for the truth--is the memory of his true love (played by Natascha McElhone), a woman who went by two names, Lauren and Sylvia (indicative of the slippery nature of her identity). On a brief romantic moonlit walk on the beach, she courageously told him, "Everyone is pretending, Truman." Soon after she said this, she was whisked away by her father, who dismissed her words as the ramblings of a madwoman. Yet Truman is haunted by her last words to him: "Get out of here! Come and find me." She vanishes from his life, but what has actually happened is that she was tossed off the show for straying from the script. Truman's refusal to accept her disappearance is the impetus for unraveling the web of lies that has been the matrix of his reality for so long. He is determined to go to Fiji, where he believes he will find her. But suspiciously, every time he tries to leave, strange events prevent him from doing so.
Truman's attempts to escape Seahaven brought a haunting question to my mind: What would freedom mean to Truman? Through television many millions of fans around the world are more familiar with his face than they are with those of people they see frequently in real life. But Truman is a person who has never had the luxury of a private self. I imagined that if he ever made it to the outside world, he would have even less privacy--his fans would hound his every move. Yet, if he remained in the artificial environment of Seahaven, he would be little more than a pawn trapped in an illusory world. Either way, his life would be a kind of living hell.
Although this film is not without its comic touches, the dramatic aspects of Jim Carrey's performance are what really surprised me. Working different ground than the kind of manic, exaggerated, over-the-top comedy that made him famous, Carrey brings off some subtler tricks here. He manages to do as much dramatically with slight changes in his facial expression and body language as he has shown in other films that he could do comically with his trademark brand of humor. Truman Burbank is a fascinating archetypical hero, an innocent everyman who has the courage to search for the truth and not to accept the lies he has been told all his life. But Truman is a character who is more mythic/iconic than realistic and thus is by design not a fully faceted character. Yet Carrey puts so much into the role that he almost makes Truman more than that, and it is difficult to imagine the movie without him. Carrey's performance gives the film its heart and humanity, and I believe that if he had not been in it, THE TRUMAN SHOW could have easily been little more than a fascinating intellectual exercise.
This is an extremely well crafted movie. I felt that the superb production design and cinematography intentionally imbued the film with a slick, soulless artificiality. This made the scenes appear wholesomely picturesque and sweetly beautiful, yet at the same time somehow so cold and sterile that there was an eerie deadliness to them. To my mind, the visual aspects of the movie were meant to echo and intensify the subtle undercurrent of horror that runs throughout the film. It is rare that style and substance work together so seamlessly in a movie. THE TRUMAN SHOW is a multifaceted and resonant film of ideas that has aspects of myth, allegory, and fable. It even delves into complex philosophical issues such as illusion and reality. A far cry from the usual summer movie fare, this is a thoughtful, nuanced film that also manages to be highly entertaining.
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