Fresh, Original, and All-Together Fascinating

Rating: 8/10 (18 June 2006)

In an age in motion pictures where heists, explosions, action set pieces, love stories and comic book adaptations dominate the silver screen, it's remarkable to come across a picture as fresh, as original, and as all-together fascinating as The Truman Show, director Peter Weir's part drama, part comedy, part social commentary on the nature of television and one's right to privacy and a normal life.
Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is an ordinary man, good natured and kind to all, who lives a sweet life of bliss in Seahaven where he works for an insurance company. He has a nice place, good neighbours, and a loving wife (Laura Linney), but what he doesn't have is any knowledge that everybody he's ever known is an actor, that those he doesn't know are extras and that Seahaven is a concealed dome: a giant stage in Los Angeles. He has no idea and that every second of every day of his life has been recorded by over 5,000 carefully placed cameras and broadcast to the entire world. He's the star of the Truman Show, the first unwanted child legally adopted by a corporation.
When a figure from his traumatic past revisits him on the streets of Seahaven, Truman begins to notice a series of strange occurrences that offer clues of his actual existence. I suppose it's an inevitability that Truman will eventually discover the truth, it's not the film's best kept secret, but the way in which it all occurs to him is certainly more than half the fun.
In all his films, Jim Carrey has never put in a performance so composed and articulate as he does in The Truman Show  possessing just the right amounts of humour and innocence necessary for Truman Burbank. In some ways, he's even funnier than he can be with any number of the over-the-top faces he has in his comedic arsenal. Ed Harris, as the show's creator and director Christof, has a small role but delivers well, and the scene where he and Truman finally speak like man and God is terrific.
There's nothing flashy in the production of Weir's documentary-style approach to The Truman Show, bar a few well-composed shots from various hidden cameras in Seahaven. What he achieves is effective, though, in the way he proposes that what society can be so engrossed in  of all things  is an ordinary man living an ordinary life, that we are willing to accept the complete sacrifice, even if not in a literal sense, of a man's entire life for the sake of entertainment. It's what makes The Truman Show ultimately so interesting for the audience, who watch it as beings even higher than Christof. It's so captivating that I felt a little dissatisfied at the end of the picture, having wanted more of Truman, more of behind- the-scenes, more of the same monotony. If it weren't for the story feeling a little too rushed before it was all over, The Truman Show could have been even more deep, felt, and enjoyable than it was, but that being said, it is an excellent and highly original motion picture.