director
Peter Weir
screenwriter
Andrew
Niccol
producers
Edward S. Feldman
Andrew Niccol
Scott Rudin
Adam Schroeder
cinematographer
Peter Biziou
music
Philip Glass
Burkhard Dallwitz
editors
William Anderson
Lee Smith
cast
Jim Carrey (Truman Burbank)
Laura Linney (Hanna Gill)
Ed Harris (Christof)
Noah Emmerich (Louis Coltrane)
Natascha McElhone (Lauren Garland)
Holland Taylor (Angela Burbank)
Brian Delate (Kirk Burbank)
Blair Slater (Young Truman)
Paul Giamatti (Control Room Director)
Harry Shearer (Mike Michaelson)
Philip Baker Hall (Network Executive)
mpaa rating: PG
running
time: 103m
u.s.
release: June 5, 1998
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other peter
weir films
reviewed on this website:
- master
and commander:
the far side of the world
see also:
- ed
tv
|
Why
do millions of people watch the happy-go-lucky and rather routine
daily activities of Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey)? In The Truman
Show, an intelligent, sometimes powerful, but ultimately
disappointing fable, people sit glued to their TVs 24 hours a
day, watching Truman move cheerfully through his sunshiny hometown
Seahaven on his way to work. Some of the viewers, we're told,
find his humdrum life soothing -- he's living the ideal, conflict-free
life. Others, I imagine, are waiting for the moment when he discovers
what everyone else in the world knows -- that he's living inside
a perpetual TV show, "on the air unaware."
The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir (Dead Poets
Society) from a script by Andrew Niccol (who wrote and directed
the superior Gattaca
last year), takes a rather ugly view of American voyeurism. There
they are -- there we are -- staring at this poor bastard
going through his paces. The movie is a metaphor for any number
of media evils (it has its spiritual side, too), but it only
occasionally probes what it might actually be like to
find out that your entire life has been faked -- or what it's
like to be one of those actors hired to play Truman's wife or
best friend. Weir and Niccol haven't really imagined or gotten
inside their characters. The film is a skilled and elegant blank
(it is significant, if nothing else, as the first and very likely
last Jim Carrey movie scored by Philip Glass and Burkhard Dallwitz),
and it doesn't end up saying much of anything.
Jim Carrey tries hard -- his trying hard registers as conscious
restraint, trying not to be wacky -- and his performance isn't
bad, but it isn't entirely successful, either. At times, he reminded
me of Robin Williams working overtime to achieve sad-clown pathos;
it may be a few years before Carrey can simply relax and be a
normal Earthling, as Williams did in Dead Poets Society
or Good Will Hunting. I suppose my basic complaint may
sound ungrateful: Carrey isn't very funny here -- he doesn't
find humor in Truman beyond the "Good morning! And if I
don't see ya, good afternoon and good evening!" shtick we've
seen in the ads.
Seahaven is actually a gigantic studio set, run by a Godlike
director named Christof (Ed Harris); he's literally the man in
the moon -- Seahaven's faux moon is his headquarters. Harris
is impressive in his intense, bullheaded way, as usual -- but
what, if anything, does Christof feel about Truman, his greatest
creation? And what about the actress who plays Meryl, Truman's
wife? Laura Linney, in a terrific Chinese-box performance (playing
an actress playing Meryl), shows glimmers of the real woman under
the facade, but the script doesn't help her. Does she have a
life outside Seahaven? Perhaps even another man? All of these
things might have been suggested, painted with delicate strokes
and putting small holes in Truman's illusion, instead of the
broad hints he gets (a studio light falling from the sky, etc.).
The film gets to you occasionally, when it triggers common paranoia
and plays on your fleeting thoughts that everything around you
has been conspiratorially staged. But it's amorphous; it can
be interpreted any number of ways -- for a while, I read it as
the interior dissolution of a paranoid schizophrenic who has
delusions of grandeur and finally hears the voice of God (Christof)
in his head. The movie could be that, or it could be a statement
about the decrease of privacy or the increase in isolation --
and, of course, the media is to blame for it all. But "the
media" is a meaningless straw man if you don't also indict
its audience -- and, in the end, we're let off the hook. The
voyeurs become Truman's ardent supporters, rooting for him to
break out of the same false reality they've been watching for
thirty years.
The Truman Show isn't meant to be taken literally, and
it may appeal, like Forrest
Gump, to softhearted idealists. But some of us may go
out wishing for something meatier, edgier. Everyone in the movie
seems as confined as Truman, and the gifted filmmakers seem as
distant as Christof -- looking down on us from the moon and dropping
comforting pieties. |
