good acting, good story, terrific theology

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2000)

I saw Truman Show four times and bought the video. No, I'm not a Carrey fan - though when I heard he was going to be in Truman Show I watched The Mask and knew why Weir had agreed to direct him. In repose he has exactly the face that Weir seems to look for. Anyway, I liked him in this.
I'm no expert on technical matters, but the film looked great. Acting has to be BAD for me to notice; nothing here was that bad. Ed Harris played the obsessed director Christof brilliantly - a hypnotist's voice and an illusionist's hands. The music was just right. How many people spotted the ring-in in the soundtrack, Polish composer Kilar's The Preaching of Father Kolbe, and how it's used? (For anyone who doesn't know, Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan priest who died in Auschwitz in the place of another prisoner.) But what hooked me was the story. Truman Show reminded me of G K Chesterton - not the Father Brown stories, but the theological polemics and over-the-top fantasies. Surface glitter and intellectual wit concealing an emotional and spiritual double whammy.
Yes, this film is a metaphor but subtler than it seems. Christof ISN'T anything like the Biblical God but he's a pretty close image of the thing the New Testament calls "the god of this world", "prince of the power of the air", "father of lies" and "a murderer from the beginning". Truman is all of us, a "twentieth century boy", modern/ postmodern man reared inside the closed universe of the rational materialists, an "unreal city", a God-free zone where Man is god and material happiness is the most we are allowed to hope for. But what happens if we fall in love with someone who tells us it's all a Big Lie? "Get out of here.come and find me". What if it's an open universe after all? Open - but not empty. The whole film works brilliantly as a Pilgrim's Progress for the heirs of the Enlightenment