Movie Review: The Truman Show (1998)
The Truman Show is truly a delightful movie that succeeds primarily for three reasons: the clever screenplay by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca), the creative direction by Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society), and the charms of Jim Carrey (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
Much of the talk of this movie today seems to center around its prophetic anticipation of the rise of reality television. It certainly works as clever satire of humans’ natural tendency to be nosy and intrusive.
Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man unwittingly starring in his very own reality telivision show. We’re revealed a little bit about his status early on, through documentary-like interviews with series creator Christof (Ed Harris, Apollo 13) and the actress that plays Truman’s wife (Laura Linney, Kinsey).
The first real weird thing that Truman notices comes shortly after, when a light falls from the sky. Truman goes to work at an insurance firm, and is given an assignment to go to some island, but chooses not to, afraid of the water. In the evening, when he has a conversation with his best friend, Marlon (Noah Emmerich, Miracle), he has a flashback to a time in which he was sailing with his father (Brian Delate), who died in a storm, with Truman reaching out to him.
Back in the present, it starts raining on Truman, and he gets up to find that it isn’t raining merely feet away. The rain follows him, and he gets a kick out of it, until rain starts coming down everywhere.
He goes home to his wife, Meryl Burbank (Linney), and tells her about his plans to leave his town. Everyone arounds him tries to convince him that he never has to leave, some in more subtle ways than others. A coworker shows him a newspaper declaring that his town of Seahaven Island has been voted the finest place to live.
And you know what, it does look nice, but it also looks so artificial, making it a perfect location. It truly feels like a set made to imitate mid-century America, though it wasn’t. It was actually filmed at a master-planned community on the Florida panhandle known as Seaside. It’s one of my favorite movie locations. It looks ridiculously pleasant, but there’s also something unnerving about it.
The next day, when he goes to buy a newspaper, we see someone in the background reading a headline “Who Needs Europe.” Truman sees someone that looks like his father, who is about to speak with him, until he’s pulled away by a few mysterious people, and Truman is suddenly swarmed with joggers. Truman runs after him, but he’s taken onto a bus that drives away.
Truman meets with his mother (Holland Taylor), and tells her about how he saw the spitting image of his father. she says that he was just mistaken, but Truman’s suspicions over nobody having found his dad’s body are made clear. He looks through old photographs of him as a kid with his father, and keeps it from his wife.
After his wife tells him to buy a new brand-name lawnmower, he goes through an old sweater of his, and the film cuts to people watching him on TV, which then shows a flashback to his days in college, when he locks eyes with a beautiful woman (Natascha McElhone), only to be interrupted by his future wife, Meryl. We see the two of them at a dance, and Truman again locks eyes with that woman, who is taken away by men in suits in similar fashion to the man that looked like Truman’s father.
We then see Truman in his college library, studying, when he finds that he’s across from that woman. He nervously introduces himself to Lauren, and we see her wearing the sweater that Truman had found in the present. He takes her out on a date, with her insisting that it be now and not at a later date. They run off to the beach, and Lauren acts suspicious, saying that they don’t want her talking to him, and that they could be there any minute. After they kiss, a car shows up, and Lauren hurriedly tries to explain that his life is a charade. She says her name isn’t really Lauren and that everyone is pretending. A man gets out of the car and says he’s Lauren’s mother, though Laren insists she’s never seen him before. She tells Truman to get out of here and find her, and the father tells him that they’re moving to Fiji.
Earlier in the movie, in the present, Truman had been talking about going to visit Fiji. It’s revealed by the people watching TV that he didn’t immediately go to Fiji because his mother got sick and he had to look after her.
On the back of a photograph he has of his wife, Truman is trying to reconstruct Lauren’s face with a bunch of features he’s cut out from models’ faces in magazines.
The next day, as Truman is driving, his radio starts acting up, and he eventually hears people discussing his actions. When they change frequencies, everyone around him stops in their tracks for a moment. Truman gets out of his car and walks, choosing not to go to his office, instead observing those around him with suspicion. A bus nearly hits him, and he stops traffic, noticing that everyone’s actions are affected by him. Instead of going to his office, he goes into another office, and opens the elevator door to find crewmembers, before he’s pulled away by security.
He goes to his friend Marlon and tries to explain what’s going on, though he thinks it all has something to do with his father. Marlon of course is dismissive, but chooses to leave with Truman nonetheless.
Truman, his mother, and his wife all go through an old photo album and come across a picture of Truman and his family in front of an obviously fake Mount Rushmore. After the two women leave, Truman goes through photos of his wedding day, and is disturbed to find a picture of his wife crossing her fingers.
Truman follows his wife to work and gives a nurse a message that he’ll call her from Fiji. He sneaks into a restricted area and watches his wife perform surgery on a patient that’s clearly not under. He gets pulled away, and goes to a travel agency with a poster warning of the dangers of air travel. He tries to book a flight to Fiji, but nothing is free for a month.
He instead boards a bus for Chicago, but the bus won’t start once Truman is on it. When his wife comes home from work, he takes his wife on an impromptu road trip, making his suspicions apparent. Traffic suspiciously blocks him at every turn, so he goes in reverse, and comes back around to the same road to see no traffic blocking his way. He comes to the bridge that leads off the island, and terrified of the water, slams on the accelerator and has his wife steer. A fire appears on the road and he drives through it. They eventually come to a nuclear power plant where there has been a leak, with the area being evacuated. He gets out and runs, being chased and eventually apprehended by a bunch of people in hazmat suits.
At home, Truman is bothered by his wife’s commercial for some cocoa brand, and he eventually comes at her, and Meryl pulls a knife. She yells out “Do something,” and Marlon shows up. Meryl cries, and laments how she cannot carry on under these conditions.
Marlon and Truman have an emotional conversation outside, and it’s revealed to the viewer (though not to Truman), that Marlon’s lines are being fed to him by Christof. He then reveals to Truman Truman’s father, whom he had seen earlier, dressed as a homeless man. We see Christof in the control room, dictating what cameras the show should cut to, with live music being orchestrated. Truman and his father embrace, and viewers at home celebrate.
In the control room, they are celebrating as well. In addition to Christof, there’s the control room director Simeon (Paul Giamatti, Sideways).
We then finally get some exposition provided by a television interview between Harry Shearer and Christof. The control room is up in the moon in a giant dome viewable from space, and it’s revealed that Christof is a very private person that doesn’t talk with the press a lot. He admits that there have been intrusions before from the outside world, and we see some of these comical scenes of people trying to tell Truman that he’s on TV. Christof says that as Truman grew up, they had to come up with ways to keep him on the island, so Christof decided to drown the character of Truman’s father. He then takes some calls from viewers at home, and he explains that he was chosen for the show because he was born early, and became the first child to be legally adopted by a corporation.
One of the calls comes from Sylvia, the actress that had played Lauren, who accuses Christof of lying and manipulating Truman. Christof defends himself, saying that he’s given Truman happiness by keeping him from the real world. At the end of the interview, Christof reveals that Meryl will be written of the show, and Truman will soon have a new wife, as he is determined to show the first on-air conception in television history.
It’s kind of amazing that we really don’t get the exposition dump until this late in the movie and it feels completely justified. The movie makes great use of flashbacks and visuals to give us enough information for the first half of the movie. We understand why Truman is suspicious.
Following the interview, Truman seems to be back to normal.
At work, Truman is introduced to the woman that’s supposed to be his new love interest, Vivian. At night, when Truman is supposedly sleeping, we see people in the control room observing Truman through night vision on their hidden cameras. Christof grows suspicious, and has someone call Truman’s home. They then rewind the tape and find that Truman has escaped.
Marlon is sent to Truman’s home to look for him, coming into the basement to find a Christmas decoration where Truman was supposedly sleeping. He finds an escape tunnel leading to the lawn. For the first time in over 30 years, Christof cuts the transmission.
The moon then becomes a giant searchlight, as every extra on the show begins their search. Christof turns it to day to help with the search. Christof decides to watch the sea, and they find him sailing. They resume transmission.
They try to send people to follow Truman in their boats, but the actors don’t know how to drive the boats. They decide to localize a storm over the boat, with Christof certain that it will force Truman to turn back. Instead, Truman carries on, with the storm nearly killing him, as he ties himself to the boat.
After the storm is called off, Truman’s boat crashes into the wall that is the painted horizon. He finds stairs and a door, and says his goodbye to the camera as Christof talks to him, explaining the situation. He takes a bow, and takes his first steps into the real world, and we see television viewers including Sylvia rejoicing.
This is a really great movie that gets better everytime I see it. The ending is incredibly triumphant because we as viewers have grown so attached with the Truman Burbank character, who’s played brilliantly by Jim Carrey, in what I’d consider his best performance to date. He’s so genial, and his ultra-sincerity not only emphasizes the artificiality of the other characters around him, but makes us like him all the more.
The movie is very creatively directed by Weir. Most of the movie is shot through hidden cameras, existing in places like on buttons on people’s clothes, and the dashboard of Truman’s car. The script is endlessly clever. This is a movie that could quite likely succeed on its premise alone, but instead adds so many interesting details to it, like the product placement and the flashbacks showing Truman as a child, seeing his hopes of becoming an explorer crushed by an elementary school teacher.
The movie is quite funny, but I wouldn’t really call it a comedy. Most of the humor comes from the cuts to people viewing at home, which are effective both for humor and pathos. The movie’s satiric dystopia, however, is appealing primarily as drama.
Rating: 10/10
