The Truman Show '

Sometimes, although not often enough, a Hollywood entertainment succeeds in persuading people to look at the world they're living in, and to reflect on what is being done to them. In recent years most of these films have been about the media, in one guise or another, which is hardly surprising. Nor is the basic idea of The Truman Show exactly astonishing. You'd need to have been dead for the last 10 years not to understand that the commercial imperatives of the mass media have changed the relationship between information and entertainment in most people's lives. But Peter Weir's film is so cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed that it almost seems like a fresh thought. And even if it doesn't, it nevertheless forms the basis of a very …show more content…
Everything is covered, in all senses. When a microphone breaks its moorings, falling from the 'sky' and shattering on a pavement a few yards from Truman , his puzzlement is quickly answered by a radio news bulletin describing debris falling from a passing airliner.
The screenplay is by Andrew Niccol, whose directorial debut, Gattaca, presented a thoughtful and elegant speculation on a future determined by genetic engineering earlier this year. Niccol inserts deft satirical touches (such as the use of product placement in real-time transmission) and finds ingenious explanations for most of the potential implausibilities, including the fact that in all his 30 years Truman has never ventured away from this little haven of peace, prosperity and pristine clapboard houses - a sort of Knots Landing minus adultery, violence and …show more content…
Although Truman has been advertised as his first straight role, in fact it merely requires him to tune his usual over-the-top weirdness down to an appropriate blend of Cliff Richard's wholesome grin, Jerry Lewis's comic energy and Anthony Perkins's spooky mildness.
I loved Weir's explanation for the character's grotesque good humour, which at first seems like nothing more than Carrey 's overplaying. It is, after all, the only mode of behaviour Truman knows, since he has been confronted from birth by characters acting in a way that they think will please him, in order to win his favour and thereby influence Christof to extend their contracts. Such attention to philosophical background is the reason the film works so well.
Actually, though, I don't think The Truman Show is really about the manipulation of modern media at all. That's just an excuse. What Niccol and Weir were after was a setting for an allegory dealing with something much more timeless: nothing less than the existentialist dilemma. Is each of us alone? Who's really in control? Now there's the oldest human conundrum, and the biggest story, of