Medium cruel

Big Brother is us in The Truman Show

by Peter Keough

THE TRUMAN SHOW. Directed by Peter Weir. Written by Andrew Niccol. With Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Natascha McElhone, Holland Taylor, and Ed Harris. A Paramount Pictures release. At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, Lincoln Mall, Narragansett, Showcase, Tri-Boro, Westerly, and Woonsocket cinemas.

"Maybe I'm being set up for something," says Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) after an especially disconcerting day. "Do you ever feel like that . . . ? Like your whole life has been building up to something?"

It's safe to say everybody has felt like that; without a sense of manifest destiny, however illusory, the seeming meaninglessness of life would become unbearable. Such ideas of reference, or perhaps relevance, are what give our media culture life. When consecrated by the tube, the tabloid, or the movie screen, everyday turmoil, squalor, and triviality apotheosize into myth. With genius, audacity, and compassion, and only rarely missing the mark, Peter Weir's The Truman Show poises a pin over this bubble of significance.

Truman Burbank's life, superficially at any rate, seems ideal. He's got a "desk job" selling insurance, a radiantly smiling Donna Reed-like wife, Meryl (Laura Linney), a childhood pal, Marlon (Noah Emmerich), always ready for a heart-to-heart over a sixpack, and a toy-like, white-picket-fenced home in Seahaven, an idyllic island community whose cake-icing-white, pseudo-Victorian architecture, suffused by a preternatural, hyperrealistic light, is one of this film's more superficial resemblances to Patrick McGoohan's groundbreaking '60s TV series, The Prisoner.

True, Truman has his share of heartache and tragedy. As is shown in flashback (a problematic device, as it turns out, in this film), his father died in a boating accident when Truman was eight, which induced a lifelong fear of the water. And as a college student he was beguiled by the siren-like Lauren (or was it Sylvia?), a flirtation that ended at night on the beach with her screaming "You think this is real? It's all for you! A show!" as a man identifying himself as her father came out of nowhere to drag her off to "Fiji."

Truman copes by retreating to his basement, to hold her sweater (with a button reading "How Will It End?" pinned to it) and try to reconstruct her features with bits and pieces of photos of models torn from fashion magazines. The end, however, is signaled not by a comet or an asteroid, but by a falling star. "Sirius," to be exact -- that's the label on the high-intensity light fixture that falls at his feet as he heads out to work one morning.

It's not the first anomaly in his life, or the last. His car radio begins to deliver highly personal messages. A homeless man turns out to be his supposedly deceased father. Inappropriate segues from his wife seem oddly like product-placement plugs. An elevator door opens to reveal what look like crewmen and actors lounging between shots in a television production.

It's a tribute to Peter Weir's subtlety, pacing, and irony that we can so readily shake off the implausibility of a person's life being turned into a TV show that's broadcast for 30 years, 24 hours a day, and requires mind-boggling technology, including an enormous, womb-shaped studio -- "one of two man-made objects visible from space! (the other being the Great Wall of China)," crows the show's announcer. And it's a tribute to Weir's shrewd narrative instincts that we don't get to shake off The Truman Show's nightmarish implications. His deft balancing of point of view, from the bewildered Truman to his rapt viewers to the show's creator, Christof (a splendidly understated Ed Harris, as sinister in his benevolence as he is in his menace), compels our identification with the hapless hero even as it implicates us in the conspiracy that confounds him.

Heightening this ambivalence is the wit and irony of Weir's visuals. With odd angles and distorting lenses he reproduces the point of view of the TV show's hidden cameras; more insidiously he re-creates the show's kitschy emotional exploitiveness. A teary reunion remains dramatically effective despite cuts to the crass behind-the-scenes manipulations. Adding to the moment's uncanniness is the setting -- an unfinished bridge suspended over the void. Weir's sometimes jarringly surreal imagery, reminiscent of Magritte and de Chirico, climaxes in a stunning sequence in which Truman discovers that the sky is indeed the limit.

Ultimately, though, it's Carrey who grounds The Truman Show with his persona and his restraint. At first a parody of wholesomeness ("Good morning!" he chirps to neighbors. "And if I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and good night!"), he draws on his antic id as the artifice of his world unravels and he strives to comprehend and flee from it. Some fans of Ace Ventura may not be happy with his lack of shtick (there is a close-up of his backside, but it remains silent). If patient, though, they will be moved by a performance that aspires to the grandeur of tragedy. Which is something the film falls short of; it does not propose that where the illusions of The Truman Show shatter, those of the real world are only beginning.

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Hairy Truman

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