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Soon enough, other films will have Truman on their mind. Ron Howard's Ed TV is about a fellow plucked from obscurity who becomes a star when his life airs live on a 24-hour cable series, and Gary Ross's Pleasantville is about a couple of siblings who get stuck in a '50s sitcom. Shades of Groundhog Day: sophisticated variations of media-bent virtual reality.
The standard film has no such lofty ambitions. It takes its audience on a familiar ride. Actors pretend to be heroes or villains doing amazing or funny things. And we, in an implied compact with the filmmakers, pretend it's real. In The Truman Show the rules are more complicated. We are watching a movie that purports to be a TV show and that we (along with everyone else but Truman) know is fake. Occasionally we watch "viewers" of the show, in their home or a bar, reacting to some dramatic moment. And at times we watch Christof and his crew directing the show. Weir, like his alter ego Christof, lays the process of magicmaking and manipulation open before us. Here's how we do it, people: music and mirrors.
And still--in, for example, a scene that reunites Truman with his long-absent father--the film reaches an improbable emotional intensity. The two men hug; the folks in a bar cheer; Christof cues the swelling music and crinkles with paternal pride; and the grand fakery of it all works its sorcery on the heart. In one scene you get the truth in an actor's lie, the art in the oldest melodramatic tricks, the gotcha! of cinema's power to create a simpler, more beautiful world on screen. This is pure moviemaking, naked and irresistible.
Part of the drama is in the antidrama, the visual geniality of Seahaven. It's a Disneyland dream of cheer and rectitude. The film's light is soothing, beckoning--a near life experience. Its cool glow is so infusive you may feel you're getting a gentle tan as you watch the film. This could be a spiffy updating of TV's first great Springfield--the setting for that archetypal '50s idyll Father Knows Best--rather than the wildly twisted suburbia of Homer Simpson or the Armageddon-arsenal Springfield of Kip Kinkel. The only weapon flaunted in The Truman Show is a dicer-peeler-grater.
One can quibble with Weir's editing; the movie cops out on greatness with a few truckling reaction shots at the climax. And one can question Niccol's vision of the future of TV: not 500 channels nattering to niche markets but one big show binding the world in the bogus bliss of pink-cheeked Americana. And the idea of a program uninterrupted by commercials (Christof makes his money from product placement and ancillary markets) is nearly as naive as Truman. The show is also pretty tame. Unlike most daytime-drama characters, Truman is a faithful husband who has no evil twin and does not suffer bouts of amnesia. For 30 years the show has been a pageant of placidity, a hypoallergenic soap opera where the tension is in the subtext. Will he find out? How's it going to end?
This is the world made for Truman--so serene it's spooky. And eventually, like the hero of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (that potent fable of '50s restlessness that was, in its way, the anti-Father Knows Best), Truman begins to suspect that perfection isn't all it's supposed to be.