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But the key was always Carrey's take on the main character. "Truman isn't the man next door," says Weir. "He's someone who was brought up by wolves and lived in a nest of liars. The people around him were ambitious actors, and all his life they were leaning in very close to him. There was a lot of grinning by overfriendly people trying to gain his influence. Thus he has a very public persona, an exaggerated external self." The director could be describing the Jim Carrey who in 1994 had emerged from supporting status into the heat of celebrity and sycophancy. Weir also detected "something alien about Jim, an 'otherness' that worked."
It worked because Carrey performed self-scrutiny that amounted to a makeover. The Chiclet festival of his smile is often used to undercut an opponent or close the sale of a gag. Here, modified by a few watts, it is a beacon of innocence, vulnerability. Except for Mom and a couple of wives, has anyone before thought of the Carrey face as beautiful? In this film it surely is. That's star quality and craft in tandem, the gift of recapturing innocence even as the movie recaptures the ability of the best old Hollywood films to work as metaphor and magic. Together, Carrey and The Truman Show leave the viewer with a spectral feeling that somehow warms: the shiver of radiance.
--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles