The Truman Show (1998)
– Half Philip K. Dick and half Plato’s allegory of the cave, Peter Weir's The Truman Show is a prescient critique
of reality television (a full two years before Survivor) with a strong dose of existential philosophy and a little
Christian creation theory for good measure.
Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, who unwittingly stars in a reality
show orbiting entirely around him. In
short, he’s the only genuine thing in the simulacrum of Seahaven; think Leave It to Beaver meets Big Brother. While his whole life is being directed by television
auteur Christof (a smartly understated Ed Harris), Truman discovers holes in
his own reality as he wonders why he can’t leave town and whether he’s the
center of the universe. Carrey, at the
time known mostly for his broad strokes comedy in Ace Ventura and The Mask,
delivers a more restrained performance here; there are a few flashes of
slapstick and the facial clowning which made Carrey famous, but by and large
the film is more cerebral than that and explores the character’s psyche quite
well, in a frankly brilliant screenplay by Andrew Niccol. Indeed, this is a very smart film, and it
never panders to the audience by overexplaining the high concept; in the hands
of a lesser crew, the interview sequence with Christof would have been
overladen with exposition, but instead The
Truman Show uses it to explore some of the implications of this particular
reality program, rendering Christof not as a mustache-twirling villain but as
an antagonist with a high emphasis on aesthetics over ethics. Eventually the film addresses a key
existential theme – the necessity of choice in freedom – and the film’s
conclusion subverts our expectations by denying us a key confrontation but
leaves us with the only ending this story could have. The
Truman Show comes highly recommended, both as casual entertainment and as
thought experiment.That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment