# Truman Show, The (1998)

### reviewed by
Laurence Mixson

    The Truman Show (1998)

Starring Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, and Noah Emmerich.

Review by Laurence Mixson (venom8@hotmail.com)

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    **** out of ****

When I first saw the ads for The Truman Show, I expected this: a Jim Carrey comedy, with maybe a little bit of a serious side(I'd heard about a "total departure" from his normal routine) about a man whose life is watched by the whole world on TV. Then, I started hearing that the film was the event of the decade, and the best movie this summer. So I began to expect maybe something a little more heartfelt, about a character we all can root for, a la Forrest Gump. So which is The Truman Show? Well, neither.

Instead, the film is a deeply psychological study of greed and unchecked appetites; it is something of a message film about what can, and will, happen if we do not put limitations on our demands for entertainment. Certainly, it is Carrey's best effort to date, but it is more than just a movie; it is like a moral story told with visuals.

Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man who was brought into the world as an unwanted baby, adopted by a corporation, raised in a giant controlled set, and whose life has been filmed and seen live on national television since before his birth. Everything and everyone he sees around him is fake; the people are actors, his home and the buildings around him are sets, even the sky is nothing but a matte painting. There are thousands of cameras surrounding him, and every shot is controlled and put onto television by the director, Christof(Harris.) Truman, of course, does not know that his entire life is fake, for no one has ever told him. He accepts his life as it is.

Truman lives a comfortable suburban life: nice car, nice house, nice neighbors, nice wife(Linney). He works as an insurance company representative, and has a wonderful best friend(Emmerich.) However, he longs for more; he wants to get out of Seahaven, his artifical hometown, and go around the world; more specifically, to Fiji. His high school crush lives there, he thinks, because he was told that by her father. In reality, she was merely an extra in high school that he was not supposed to fall for, and when she tried to tell him that his whole life was fake, she was written out of the script and forced off the show.

Truman is urged on in his desire to leave not only by a lost love, but also because he senses that things are not quite right around him. One day, a spotlight falls out of the sky and onto the street in front of him. He sees a missing wall in an elevator, and a set being changed behind it. Extras appear to block his path out of nowhere, and amazing disasters occur whenever he tries to find out something that Christof doesn't think he needs to know.

Truman also has personal problems with leaving Seahaven. When he was a young boy, he saw his father drown while they were sailing in the sea during a storm. Obviously, it was an actor, and he did not really drown, it was all in the script. Yet Truman thinks it actually happened, and has been terrified of the water ever since. This is not an easy thing to deal with, because Seahaven is an island. Additionally, subliminal messages are sent at him to not leave the comfort and safety of his town; messages on TV say that there is no reason to leave the community you live in to explore the world; newspaper headlines say things like EUROPE: WHO NEEDS IT?, and posters in travel offices show airplanes being struck by lighting with captions like IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.

I began to feel discontentment while watching The Truman Show, and it continued to rise right up until the end. Not discontentment with the movie, but with the idea that this man's life is controlled, and how fake and cruel the reality of that is. Truman is the number-one celebrity around the world, outside his dome, yet he has no personal choices in his life, for everything has always been pushed upon him and decided for him. Even his material possessions are nothing but product placements, all availabe, of course, in the Truman Catalouge.

The filmmakers went to great length to show the reality of such a show, including things that could go wrong: actors becoming upset or unstable, technical problems, and people sneaking onto the set. In my opinion, The Truman Show is never once not believable. All of this, with one more small step, could become a reality in the society we live in today. Think not? Then think about The Real World, one of MTV's most popular non-music related shows. For over six years, viewers have tuned in to watch the lives of people they don't know, doing ordinary, everyday things like them. For most viewers, it is comforting to watch people on television that they identify with; people that they can relate to and understand. To take it further, all they would have to do is watch a person who doesn't know that he is being taped, because this would make it all the more real. Yet also all the more fake and cruel. And that is the message that The Truman Show sends loudly, and triumphantly, across the screen.

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