When a movie becomes as much a critics’ pet as “The Truman Show” has, it’s surprising to see it conquering the public as well.
Isn’t critical scorn a part of the price all popular movies must pay? Not — at least so far — in “Truman’s” case. “Titanic” had violent detractors. So did “Forrest Gump.” And a few critics, notably New York Magazine’s David Denby, have even filed strong dissenting notices on “Truman.”
But they’re in a distinct minority. This nightmare fable, with screwball comic Jim Carrey as the man who discovers his life is a TV show, has pulled in over $60 million in its first two weeks. And it’s also gotten more critical raves than any other big studio movie so far this year.
(Whether “Truman’s” box office clout stays strong is in doubt. There may be a lot of “Ace Ventura” and “Dumb and Dumber” fans still packing the seats, and they may desert the movie when word gets around that barf, butt and slow-mo jokes are sparse or non-existent this time around.)
I tend to agree with the majority. Directed with elegant irony and visual panache by Peter Weir (“Gallipoli,” “The Dead Poets’ Society”). “Truman Show” is a wry sunny fable, full of quirky humor, deadpan satire, impeccable visual sendups of American mores and shivery undercurrents of fear and anguish.
In the film, Carrey’s Truman Burbank is a man who exists because of TV. His life — unbeknownst to him — is a peepshow for a vast audience. His town lies in a vast, domed indoor studio. And, living in that seemingly waterlocked, cheerfully pacific, made-up community of Seahaven — surrounded by friends and neighbors who are all actors, with 5,000 hidden cameras planted around town — Truman is a man in a paradise, which is secretly a nightmare. Every move he makes is monitored by technicians and his creator: finicky, quietly intense media genius Christof.
It’s a sophisticated plot, cheerfully satirizing two of the main elements of modern American life: TV and paranoia. And that’s why the film’s initial success is so surprising. In a way, “Truman” bites the media hand that feeds it and mocks the audience that will go to it.
Carrey tried a similar serious dark comedy vein before, with less immediately successful results, in 1996’s poisonous TV satire, “The Cable Guy.” But this movie kids far more than just TV. It presents an “ideal” American community as stifling and phony, suggests that “ordinary” marriages (as to Laura Linney’s smiley Meryl Burbank) can be exploitive and friendships (as with Noah Emmerich’s Marlon), fake. It also suggests that, like Truman, we may be manipulated by unseen forces beyond our control.
The core of “Truman Show” starts with that pop paranoia and then slides to the puppet/puppetmaster relationship between smiling Truman Burbank (whose name suggests Harry Truman, Burbank, Calif., and “true man”) and tyrant Christof (whose name suggests both eccentric environmental artist Christo Javacheff and the late Polish filmmaker Krszystof Kieslowski). The movie achieves its near-greatness when the two clash.
Way up in the skies, in the hidden TV studio above Seahaven’s dome-covered set, sits the god of Truman’s false universe: “televisionary” Christof (bitingly played by Ed Harris, in one of his best performances). In his beret and bitter smile, he believes that his Seahaven is the halcyon alternative to a dangerous world, and he’s gotten much of the real world to agree with him.
“Truman Show” deserves its plaudits — even though, on one subject, its fervent supporters are stretching things. “Truman’s” script by Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”), widely hailed for its originality and unique story line, isn’t all that original. (And I’m not referring to the plagiarism suit recently filed against the producers.) Niccol’s emotionally deft story may be uncommon stuff for a big-budget Hollywood movie, but his premise replicates dozens of science fiction stories dating back to the ’40s — and quite a few previous movies and TV shows since.
Truman’s predicament — his discovery that his “reality” is manufactured by others — is an idea common in adult science fiction: The obsessive theme of the now widely praised author Philip K. Dick, whose novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was adapted into 1982’s “Blade Runner.” Dick used the theme dozens of times. And sci-fi’s most popular all-time author, Robert A. Heinlein, used it too, in his famous 1941 story “They” about a man who believes the American landscape around him is only a stage illusion — and proves to be right. Frederik Pohl’s ’50s novelette “The Tunnel Under the World” — which may have partly inspired the 1993 Bill Murray-Harold Ramis comedy, “Groundhog Day” — is about a guy who keeps waking up on exactly the same day, eventually discovering that he is trapped in a huge advertising experiment built on a tabletop.
Paul Bartel’s 1966 short film “The Secret Cinema” (remade later as an “Amazing Stories” TV episode) shows a woman who suspects she is the unknowing star of her boyfriend’s low-budget underground film. And David Chute, in an L.A. Times piece on the “Secret Cinema” link, cites a “Twilight Zone” parallel: the 1960 episode “A World of Difference,” written by Richard Matheson, with Howard Duff as a man who discovers that his life is a movie and that technicians are striking the set.
There are dozens of other examples. The basic plot of “The Truman Show,” in fact, recycles one of the central, key ideas in adult science fiction for over half a century — and one which was especially popular in the 1950s, the decade the movie’s Seahaven most evokes. (Weir and his wife, designer Wendy Stites, took old Saturday Evening Post covers and ’50s TV sitcoms as their visual models.)
What is definitely original about the film, though, is the intricately droll way writer Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) elaborates that theme. Critics like “Truman,” because they see it as popular entertainment that’s also marvellously well-made and rich in meaning. For us, “Truman” is about lots of things: TV, consumerism, pop culture, the loss of privacy, media exploitation and social conformity. And something else: The fear that your life is falling apart, that the world may be a huge illusion, a joke with a hidden punch line.
What we see, in part, is a revival of a kind of movie that used to be made regularly in the ’70s and ’80s and has been relatively moribund since. “The Truman Show” is pointed social satire, in the form of adult science fiction: a departure from the more juvenile brand of sci-fi, the “space operas’ and robot kill-a-thons. that have dominated movie houses since the 1977 success of “Star Wars.”
So, is “Truman Show” really the film of the year? Maybe. Maybe not. But — as adult science fiction, social satire, brilliant pop vision and thoughtful exploitation of the very media forces that fostered it — it’s a movie well worth every extravagant spotlight now shining on it. Even if it’s not a major innovation, all major Hollywood movies should have depth and a kick like this one.
