First time I managed to tolerate Jim Carrey

Rating: 8/10 (14 November 2016)

For quite a while I refused to watch this based on who the star was. I was familiar with his "style" and didn't care for it. I finally gave in to all the assurances that this film wasn't like his other performances, and I really liked it.
The reviewers who say it's like an episode of "The Twilight Zone" aren't far off. But I like the fact that it's not taken too seriously, unlike many TZ episodes... this subject matter, as evidenced by many of the "hated it" reviews, could easily have been presented and intended to be taken in a deadly-serious way, but it's not, and I like that.
There could easily have been a "show-down" scene at the end between a disappointed, unbalanced, angry Truman and his "creator", Christoph. I usually don't like open-ended conclusions, but in this case I thought it worked. Truman remains the nice, trusting guy he always was... he sees his newfound freedom as a gift, a long-awaited chance to see what the actual world has to offer, and he takes it, with no visible hard feelings. Why not? That's his character and his nature. A confrontation scene would have been interesting and most likely well-played by both Carrey and Harris, but it wasn't necessary. The payoff for the audience is that Christoph loses everything in the blink of an eye (fame, power, income, and the biggie: complete control), while Truman goes off to begin his REAL life (and presumably track down his lost love somewhere along the way).
It's especially interesting to view this today, with the reality-TV wave cresting. The real people on these current shows are called "cast members", their lives are called "storylines" which are played out in "seasons", and sometimes it can be hard to remember that they're actual human beings.
"The Truman Show" started, by Christoph's own admission, with an unwanted pregnancy. So did "Teen Mom".