THE TRUMAN SHOW (53)

Directed by: Peter Weir

Starring: Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich

The Pitch: A man's (True-man's) entire life is in fact, unbeknownst to him, a TV show watched by millions, overseen by an omnipotent Creator.

Theo Sez: Surprisingly thin, given all the hoopla. It's all concept, hardly any plotting to speak of - basically a puzzle ("How are They doing that?") posited in the first half and answered in the second ; it'd be pedantic to dwell on the various "cheats" (Truman's POV shots, surely impossible to predict without a camera in his brain, or the falling set-light that we see fall, though it's supposedly an accident and as unexpected for the camera-crew as it is for Truman), but the larger point is that what's onscreen never remotely feels like we're eavesdropping on someone's life - it's paced and edited like a TV show, or more accurately a Hollywood movie. To argue, as many have, that this is precisely "the point" seems to me a cop-out (and a measure of the film's success in blurring its ideas till we hardly know what it and we are talking about) : if there is a point it's presumably that TV turns real life into entertainment ("Life the Movie", as per Neal Garber's recent book) and viewers into voyeurs - as opposed, of course, to disguising life as entertainment, which is what it's always done (there's something scary and disturbing about watching Court TV ; there's nothing scary or disturbing about watching 12 ANGRY MEN). The film is meaningless unless we can feel, like the show's viewers, that there's "nothing fake" about what we're seeing - unless we were seeing things in real time, for example (oh for a five-hour Jacques Rivette remake!), or at least in a recognisable context with unvarnished emotions. As it is, the film creates a sitcom world and a plastic hero, a product of his environment (but not ours) who'd be swayed by the corniest of speeches, then pretends to be raising all sorts of important questions about media intrusion and manipulation (intrusion into what? manipulation of what? everything is media here). Valuable as a sign of the times, proof - with THE GAME, "The X-Files" and so on - that paranoia seems to run in 20-year cycles in the US (is that a reference to the 1956 / 78 INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS when the townspeople search for Truman?), as well as genuinely unusual in its implicit, work-it-out- for-yourself narrative rhythms (at least on first viewing - much of it feels a little flat and clunky when you know what's going on). Generally, though, more fun to talk about - as a metaphor for the narcissistic bubble of movie stardom, as a brave allegory about abandoning the spurious safety-net of faith for the uncertainty of atheism, or just for the many issues it's obviously trying to raise - than actually to sit through. For this viewer at least, it never connected.