Let's Talk About Movies: The Truman Show (1998)

Note - I know that I said there would be a holdover from earlier this month covered this week. However, the film I had planned to cover for that was Lets Be Cops, and certain events in Missouri make the idea of nominal cops showing off their power to the detriment of civilians a lot less funny than it once might have been. - End Note.

Alo Party Peoples

Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Andrew Niccol

I don't get the appeal of reality television. That isn't meant to denounce you if you enjoy that sort of thing, but I just don't. The so called "unscripted drama" feels shallow, and to be frank, the whole setup kind of feels like stalking a person for entertainment. A feeling that is, sort of, shared by today's subject, Andrew Niccol's The Truman Show.

Cards on the table, I love this movie. I think it stands with Gattaca and Pleasantville as some of the best high concept SF that the late 1990s had to offer, and if you know me, you know that being in the company of Pleasantville is a high honor in these parts. The reason I enjoy it is beautifully simple, and also why Pleasantville is my favorite movie, it's a smart, solid and inventive screenplay with a compelling point to make, paired with a good director and good actors.

Said screenplay concerns one Truman Burbank a seemingly average man of about 30 that leads an idyllic life as an insurance salesman in the small New England town of Seahaven. However, one day when a spotlight falls from the sky labeled with the name of a star, he starts noticing things about his life that don't quite make sense. Like how his wife keeps declaring the virtues of various items to him regardless of circumstance, or that nobody ever seems to leave town. Sure enough, something is up, unbeknownst to Truman, he is constantly under surveillance, and everybody he has ever known is an actor. He has been recorded his entire life under a massive ecological dome for the sole purpose of broadcasting his daily activities to the world as entertainment.

The contradiction of a live broadcast from a place usually
considered private is intentional.

One might take that description of the film's premise and think "this is satirically taking The Real Housewives to the next extreme", and you would be right, if it weren't for the fact that it was released in 1998. I call this sort of thing "pre-ceptive allegory", when a work feels like a satire, metaphor, and/or allegory of/for something that had not yet happened when it was made. See also, _____ Instead, the film is concerned with how we think about celebrities, in the words of the late Roger Ebert "about how celebrities live in fishbowls", and how we constantly gawk at them with no regard for their privacy or personal space. In the age of TMZ, live-streaming, ubiquitous social media, and when most of the people reading this probably have a camera and/or microphone connected to the Internet on their person at any given moment, that message is even more resonant.

Peter Weir is in prime game as the director of this picture, and his stylistic decisions compliment the screenplay's themes. For example, several shots are framed in the back of a tube and/or at fixed perspectives, almost as if the audience is looking through a peep hole, because that is exactly what the fictional audience, and modern entertainment journalism, is doing.

This shot is great. It's well composed, it's creative, and it's
 a good example of how you convey ideas with pictures.

Jim Carrey is fantastic in the title role, he might seem like a bizarre choice at first, a man mostly known for showy, energetic, over the top comedic roles, and sure enough he does have his comic moments here, but he also shows real dramatic chops here. To play Truman Burbank, you need to be able to show three things, innocence, courage, and vulnerability. Innocence to portray a man that has no idea he's been made a literal public spectacle, courage to show resistance to that idea when your world is literally stacked against you, vulnerability to show the anguish of realizing that your world is stacked against you and much smaller than you thought it was, and all of them to believably show the bewilderment of coming to the place where the horizon meets the sky and hearing a voice come down from above claiming to be the creator.

Ed Harris does a fantastic job as Christof, the TV producer behind the masquerade who started out as a documentary filmmaker that did a piece on the homeless that made him horribly familiar with the pain of the real world. That is his justification for doing this to Truman, to "give him [the] chance to lead a normal life". He states that "the world, the place you [i.e. both audiences] live in, is the sick place. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 71st Academy Awards for this role, and he deserves it.

Actually, it makes a good companion piece for Pleasantville, which coincidentally came out the same year. They are both films about people in a fabricated world made by an entity that perceives said world to be a paradise, both films draw Biblical paralells, Truman is even Christof's son in a legal sense, they both have something to say about a genre of television, and they both come down on the idea that the pleasure of a full and rich life is worth the pain that comes with it.

You can not look at this shot and claim there isn't religious
symbolism in this movie.

This is high concept SF at its best, taking an outlandish premise, and exploring how people live with it. Stuff like a dedicated fan culture of the Truman Show, the struggle to hide production goofs on the set, people protesting the show because of the blatant human rights violations, it's the stuff that lesser films would spend entire scenes explaining but this one thinks the audience can accept it if presented, that is if you don't find the very premise revolting like some do. You could teach a class on this movie, or with this movie, or both.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B