The Truman Show Review
by James Brundage (brundage AT alltel DOT net)January 31st, 1999
The Truman Show
As Reviewed by James Brundage
There's one thing that Peter Weir (the director) does with The Truman Show that makes it utterly brilliant, and it's something so subtle that you have to think to notice it. The entire time you're viewing Truman, you're not watching a movie, you're watching a show. The Truman Show, in fact. From its opening frame, where Big Brother-esque creator Christof is explaining his concept of The Truman Show, you are being drawn not into a film but into a television story. In fact, as it remains strictly within the dome in which Truman lives for the first half of the film, you are watching him not in the conventional shot of a box shape, but instead in the shape of a human eye. In the paranoid world of Truman, you are watching.
The Truman Show, in truth, has no truth. It's a movie about the farce of small town reality, and when you go there, you get weird. In so many ways this movie mirrors the darker, more industrial and film noir Best Picture nominated "Blue Velvet" (1986), the David Lynch film in which a man walks through a field, begins throwing stones at a small shack, and picks up a human ear. The bittersweet small town satire in this film is coolly and calmly apparent.
It's not a fast film. It's not a funny film. What it is is a film about humanity, about human reactions, and about how strange our realities can be as we accept them. Triumphant and sorrowful, the movie reminds me of 94's Forrest Gump, another film where you had a man not quite knowing his world.
The plot is simple: the plot of any negative utopia book or movie. A man, discovering that THEY are watching, does not like this and tries to escape. But what is he escaping from? In reality it is paradise. Acted, melodramatic, but still paradise. And the thing is, he's just like everyone else in a small town: he wants to get out.
But we have people against him. The Big Brother (George Orwell's "1984") of the establishment would rather he live in the dome, live and die on public television. Of course this makes it a film about triumph. But it has a twist to it: at the end, it makes it so you don't know what you want. Posed to go out the door, part of you is cheering for him to run, and part of you wants him to stay, to continue providing hope. He's told to say something. He thinks. Opens his mouth and …
You'll have to see it for yourself.
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