"While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself... It isn't always Shakespeare, but it's genuine. It's a life." Oh the prescience. Big Brother. I'm A Celebrity. Celebrity Big Brother. We all love to watch, scour every minute of every day of people we don't know and, crucially, rarely like. Comfort yourself with a live feed, catch up on what you've already seen at 10pm, read about it in the papers... It's the crux of The Truman Show. An insurance salesman, with a boring wife and a boring job and the dress sense of a '50s prat, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) would not be your friend, yet in Peter Weir's crystal ball world he's an escape. Live someone else's tiresome life rather than worrying about your own.
Eight years on, the sheer gall of Christof, Ed Harris' portentous, pontificating creator, remains unmatched in our world, thanks to the twin evils of morality and The Law. While on the Making Of doc (How's It Going To End?) writer Andrew Niccol's script is praised as "not being a far-out concept now" - as far as we know, no TV channel has been secretly constructing an enormo-dome, visible from space, for the birth and growth of a pawn human. So, as with before the turn of the century, for the pinnacle of reality TV all we have to watch is The Truman Show...
Lovingly fashioned, unique in concept and edged along by Philip Glass' plinkety-plonk score, Weir's film stands up as one of the finest achievements of the '90s. Watch it again, knowing the gradual unravelling, and you see motifs - submerged boat, Seahaven voted best place in the world, everyone in love with Truman's sickly bubbly optimistic oblivious front - that could only exist on a TV show designed around one man. Overwrought with sadness (his 'secrets' aren't secrets, his 'friends' are actors, everything's fake), you fear that Natascha McElhone's angel on the inside's "How's it going to end" question can only have one answer. Yet seemingly unlike many of the ensuing stars of CCTV - Bubble, Jade, Kinga(!) - Truman is human; and being human, he twigs that something ain't right and starts searching for a life beyond television. It's a slow realisation dealt with in a why-the-hell-did-they-cut-that? deleted scene where Truman yells "It's a miracle!" upon seeing the same man/extra jogging past him who he'd previously seen wheelchair-bound. Alas, in this okayish DVD pack (no Weir commentary, average Making Of, no Look How Forward Thinking We Were! doc), we are not told why it was snipped. Must. Try. Harder.
Incredibly for a man previously best known as a gurning lunatic, Jim Carrey's Simpleton performance finishes a very close second to the film's concept for plaudits. Never overplaying his character, you cheer him at the end as he leaves the set realising everything he knew was complete bullshit. It's a performance matched in Man On The Moon and bettered in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, yet it was Weir's enchanting time capsule that marked him as an actor to care about... and watch.
DVD Extras:
How's It Going To End?
Deleted/extended scenes
Faux Finishing, The Visual Effects Of The Truman Show
Photo gallery
