A Rare Gleam in the World of Comedy

Rating: 9/10 (13 August 2016)

Comedy is a barren wasteland. It's mostly populated with bad actors in good roles (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller), or fantastic actors in terrible roles (Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci). However, once in a while a movie defies all that. Once in a while, people come together to make a piece of comedy that is truly great filmmaking. It happened in "Silver Linings," "Joy," and "What About Bob." And it happened here.
From the director of "Dead Poets Society," another dramedy with a comedy actor, comes this beautiful tale of Truman Something. When I saw this movie, I did not think it was about what it was about. I thought it was more along the lines of "Good Morning Vietnam." But instead, this movie acts like Inception, and in a great way, too. It's thought-provoking.
There's a moral dilemma in this film, and that's the idea that the viewer is trying desperately to cast the blame. At first, it doesn't even seem like it's necessarily an evil thing to do. I mean, his life is made to be great. But as the film progresses, it's clear Truman is being made a victim. But who's the villain here? The catch is: it's hard to tell. Is it ever actor and actress on that show for putting up with it? Is it Christoph's, for designing it? It is his parents', for allowing the show to adopt him? Or is it everyone watching, giving the show high ratings to make them keep going? The film has a deep undertone, saying "If we give publicity to people we hate, and a system we hate, is it just proving that their system works?" And that message rings truer than ever in the desolate landscape of politics we live in.
But all that thought-provoking stuff is peppered by Jim Carrey in what is -I'll just say it- far and away his best work ever. And it proves that this world has something against Carrey by constantly putting him in roles that are so incredibly poorly written and just say "act stupid" and you feel like you're watching a terrible movie. This movie proves that he's a real actor. He can give real performances, if the writers will for once, give him the chance to act once in a while.
But there are things that prevented this movie from getting those last two stars.
The first is a lot of little oversights, like the CinemaSins kind. I usually don't care, but there were just so many here. I won't list them all, but the most bothersome one is that they claim to have the world's smallest cameras, and yet when Meryl gets scared, she knows exactly where the camera is to look into it. There's about six more I could list, but I won't.
The second, and more important, is Christoph's character. I get that he's a little hypocritical, but still. There's a lot of "who is this guy" with Christoph. Not in a good way, in a bad way, like, it doesn't seem like the same guy would do all the different things he did and say all the different things he said in this movie.
That being said, this is one of the nicest movie reviews I've ever given. This truly is one of the greatest comedies to ever hit the small screen and Jim Carrey can call it his masterwork.