# [film] "The Truman Show" A Postview, copyright p-m agapow 1998
Oh come on - you must have heard the plot of this one by now. A child is raised from birth under the eyes of TV cameras, unaware that his entire life is a top-rating television show.
"The Truman Show" has garnered a lot of prepublicity, albeit in a passive manner and for entirely good reasons. Peter Weir is a skilled director ("Fearless", "Witness", "Picnic at Hanging Rock" etc.). The writer created the elegant "Gattaca". The central idea is one that has probably occurred to everyone: What if the entire world is run for me? How do I know it's all real? So "The Truman Show" arrives to some expectations.
Jim Carrey, perhaps having learnt that less is more, is thankfully under control and surprising good as the increasingly paranoid Truman. Ed Harris gives a tour-de-force performance as Christof, the director of "The Truman Show" who, although remote and clinical, clearly loves Truman. And the central idea is dazzlingly realised. Truman's home town is a hermetic environment, a physical virtual reality in which the stars are stage lamps, the citizens line up in the morning at "first positions", every encounter is orchestrated, and even the weather bends to the whim of the director. A whole world of merchandising, Truman T-shirts and Truman bars, follow and lead the TV show. It's a breathtaking vision.
Which doesn't explain the nagging sense of disappointment when the credits roll. What's wrong with this film? That's difficult to say. Half of the problem, I think, is that the film assumes you know what it's about from the very beginning. If someone were to watch "The Truman Show" without any foreknowledge, I'd suspect they would be very puzzled indeed and see a very different film to the one I saw. Relying on knowledge of publicity is lazy at best.
The other half of the problem is that the script doesn't seem to know what to do with its big setup. It has a story, but is not really about anything. Is this a commentary about television and the media? If so, it's a very muted one. The vast global audience watching Truman is shown caring for his fate and cheering on his triumphs. It is only at the very end that it dare be suggested that to them, Truman is not a person but just entertainment. However, other possible interpretations have been floated. Is it a metaphor for the relationship between humanity and God? Maybe - director Christof acts fairly God-like. Is it a gloss on paranoia and schizophrenia? Truman's behaviour lends some weight to this theory. But still there's that feeling of uneasiness as if the film is crying out to make a point or say something, but is being stifled. This emptiness leads one - unfairly - to dwell on plot inconsistencies and how clumsily the TV show is run. It becomes implausible that the directors of Truman's life have stayed hidden from him for 30 years, so oafish and blunt are their tricks. (The actors all have radio earphones, yet blindly give themselves away where a few instructions from the omniscient central control would have defused the situation. Their search for Truman when he is lost totally shatters the illusion of the programme, yet they hope to keep filming the show.) These are doubts that should never occur to the viewer, and wouldn't have had the central story been more engrossing.
In fact, "The Truman SHow" is an oddly pleasant and mild film, where one would have expected an impactful or thoughtful one. It's still a good film, but one that's good despite its realisation. [***/interesting] and a reproduction of a good painting on the Sid and Nancy scale.
"The Truman Show" Released 1998. Directed by Peter Weir. Written by Andrew Niccol. Starring Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Natascha McElhone.
-- Paul-Michael Agapow (p.agapow@ic.ac.uk), Dept. Biology, Imperial College "We were too young, we lived too fast and had too much technology ..."
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