The Truman Show Review
by "Wallace Baine" (wbaine AT cruzio DOT com)June 15th, 1998
Sunny 'Truman Show' has a heart of darkness
by Wallace Baine
Film writer
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Peter Weir’s dazzling daydream “The Truman Show” has been tabbed as this year’s “Forrest Gump,” but a more worthy comparison might be Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Like that 1939 classic starring James Stewart in the title role, “Truman” is about a guileless Everyman who gradually confronts the vast, corrupt forces of cynicism that surround him. In Capra’s world, the setting was the vulgar world of capital politics. In Weir’s, it’s much more ominous and to-the-point in our corporatized, media-poisoned times. This time, Mr. Smith goes to cable. Television has never looked so cancerous as it does in “The Truman Show,” a surreal and immensely likable fable that straddles the line between comedy and drama. Starring the elastic superstar Jim Carrey, “Truman” is set in a postcard-perfect little seacoast town called Seahaven, as clean and orderly as a Hollywood back-lot. In fact, it is a back-lot, an enormous, climate-controlled Xanadu of a TV studio where everyone is an actor playing a role and 5,000 hidden cameras broadcast the goings-on 24 hours a day to a worldwide TV audience that dwarves “Seinfeld’s” ratings.
The only guy not working from a script is the show’s star, Truman Burbank (Carrey), an amiable doofus who’s been on candid camera since birth. He has no idea that his every waking (and sleeping) moment is providing the world with a compelling fix of voyeurism.
Watching on from a studio hidden behind Seahaven’s fake moon is the show’s creator (or Creator, if you prefer), a quietly sinister character named Christof (Ed Harris) who stage-manages every moment of Truman’s life from spoon-feeding lines to the actors who play his intimates to staging elaborate hoaxes to keep Truman from learning the truth.
One of the many delights in this smart fantasy is Seahaven itself, a kind of Stepford town whose ersatz charms have shaped Truman into what he is, a decent fellow whose whole value system has been shaped by the mock sincerity of a ’50s sitcom. Especially creepy is Truman’s wife Meryl (Laura Linney), a dimpled blonde whose sing-song June-Cleaver-on-Prozac schtick is put to use on nakedly commercial product placements or to dissuade Truman from thinking too hard about his circumstances.
Weir, the Australian director whose lucid, penetrating pictures include “Witness” and “Dead Poets Society,” makes several interesting choices. We don’t go behind the scenes of “The Truman Show” until about half way through, allowing Weir to guide us through the unreality of Truman’s world as he lives it. One of the first signs that all is not well in Truman’s world is when a stage light drops out of the clear blue sky right at Truman’s feet. Instead of bringing us backstage where a roomful of technicians are cursing their luck, Weir keeps us with Truman as he gets in his car and hears an outlandish news report on the radio that a satellite is dropping parts from the sky.
Soon, the enormity of the con becomes apparent when we are lifted into the “real world,” (whatever that is) to learn just how big Truman’s life is to couch potatoes all over the world. Ed Harris as the lordly Christof smolders with a kind of divine self-importance. He tells us that Truman is the first child legally adopted by a corporation, that there had been a few close calls with outsiders breaking into the set to tell Truman the truth. What’s going on here? Clearly, the response to this film (and I think it will be a tremendous one) will have a lot to do with a growing unease about corporate media and it’s increasing lack of respect for the dignity of privacy. Ultimately, “The Truman Show” is a film about paranoia, justifiable paranoia. The public sphere is filled with surveillance cameras these days, marketing is all about gathering personal information and the courts have not shown much in the way of defending the so-called “right to privacy.” Post-O.J., post-Diana, a scenario like “The Truman Show” becomes a more and more vivid reminder that media realities, however true-to-life, are contrived realities and our thirst for vicarious thrills trumps our respect for other’s dignity.
On another level, “The Truman Show” isn’t about the mass media at all, but rather a media-drenched take on mysticism. When Christof’s says, in explaining Truman’s 30-year cluelessness about the forces shaping his life, that “we accept the reality we are presented with,” he’s talking about you and me as well as poor oblivious Truman.
“The Truman Show” will give both the sane and questionably sane reason to ponder the significance of coincidence and fate. But, as if to remind us of our complicity in the sad life of Truman Burbank, Peter Weir brings it all back to the curse of television with a devastating final shot. If all the world’s a stage, there’s always another play going on somewhere.
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