The Truman Show

The Truman Show

Occasionally, but not enough, a work of entertainment coming out of Hollywood manages to convince its audience to look at their life and consider what is happening to them in the world around them. In recent years most of these films have been about the media in one shape or another which is not surprising.

And the underlying concept of The Truman Show is not exactly astonishing either. Unless you had been dead for the better part of a decade, you would have posted a thesis on why commercial mass media has altered how the average person perceives information and entertainment. But as Peter Weir tell us this is a well worked piece to begin with, this idea appears to be all new. And even if it is not, however, it is used in anyone’s opinion a very smart activity.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), the main character of the film, works in a fictional soap opera that has crossed the bridge into ‘reality programming’ and which runs 24 hours a day! Bored channels showing non-stop systems of life in large hotels or cruise liners? Yes, I thought Truman’s reality would be something unheard of, but as ‘life’ in his case, it has to be mundane. With all due respect, he is quite similar to all of us.

The self-styled creator of Truman, Christof, appears to be an amalgamation of Phil Redmond and Lars von Trier. He character ppwnhnce cute h has everyone else grew up on, as organized by Christof in entire perpetuity! It is located on an artificial so called ‘island’, completely within the confines of a mega-studio login Paige. Marketing system, ambition and scripts aside, Truman has no choice but to bear extremely seamless actors as relatives, fellow citizens, and colleagues. There exist small depressors as well; every such dramatic producer attempts to hold the attention of an audience that is well beyond a billion people is tremendously intense.

Wier brings us behind the scenes, high in the dome, in the production room where Christof and his directors are perched over their subject switching between thousands of cameras hidden in buttons, flowers and even behind the digital instrumentation on the dashboard of Truman’s car. Everything is covered, in all senses.

In less than a minute of his drunken stupor on the set, when a microphone becomes loose and falls down all the way from the enormous ‘open sky’ construction and crashes on a pavement a few feet away from Truman, his confusion is quickly settled by a radio channel’s news telling about wreckages falling from above the clouds.

The story was written by Andrew Niccol, the author of Gattaca a movie that came out earlier this year depicting an interesting and aesthetically pleasing view on a world where genetic engineering is advanced as ever. Niccol gets ready and completely undermines critical accidents that could have happened after including both whimsical touches and even practical nuances (the sheer abundance of commercial placement in the live broadcast).

He dreams up a number of possible explanations for the most unwelcome questions such as why, for all his thirty years, Truman never went out of this idyllic place with its ideal board huts and sweet crepes like a Knots Landing without escapades, blood and jobs.

Gradually, this utopia of an ideal society starts crumbling with the sudden return of Truman’s father who Christof has long erased from the scenes and due to the actions of this woman who was part of the cast of the show once, expressed by Natascha McElhone, the only outsider who senses any threat at all.

Niccol allows Christof to have the vision of omnipresence and Ed Harris illustrates this vision as a humorous mockery of that sick concentration on themselves and arrogance which can be met in virtually any person connected with television. This Icon of Cool in Creativity bears compliments as he successfully acts while dealing with his Director’s, played by Paul Giamatti and Adam Tomei, relaxed attitudes and with tough network’s executives played by Philip Baker Hall and John Pleshette both being excellent veteran actors.

Seaside, which is less than 20 years old and pillaged into American culture as a localized Portmeirion’s clone, fulfills the space of Truman’s home. Its obsessive neatness and shiny surfaces are cleverly utilized by Weir’s designer Gassner Marcia, who previously worked on The Grifters and Barton Fink. Gassner’s imagination also allows the lead in where Truman stands border of his universe for ‘a real life film’.

As for Carrey, it’s a performance to wow even those who have an inbuilt aversion to his stretched out face. Although he has been billed as the first Truman in a straight role, it only means that he has to moderate his usual excessive baggage of eccentricity into a mixture of a Cliff Richard smile, Jerry Lewis comic, and Anthony Perkins calm uneasiness.

I was also won over by Weir’s articulation about how the character’s awful good cheer, which at first gives the impression of nothing but Carrey over the top, comes about. This, after all, is the only mode of behavior Truman has ever known. From the day he was born, he has been surrounded by people whom he has been taught will do everything in their power to win him over and hence influence Christof to extend their contracts. It is just such attention to the philosophical underpinning of the movie that makes it effective.

However, I do not consider The Truman Show an attempt to depict the effects of the media in general. It’s just a nail to hang ideas on. What Niccol and Weir were really interested in was a plot for their larger than life theme within the story: the timelessness of this thing is the existentialist problem. Is solitude an inevitable consequence of one’s existence? Who casts the net? At the end of it all it is the most pressing question for mankind, one that all stories concern.

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