The Truman Show (1998) Rated PG
Directed by Peter Weir
Who has also done Dead Poets’ Society and Master and Commander
Written by Andrew Niccol
Who has also done Gattaca and The Terminal
Cast/Characters
Truman Burbank Jim Carrey
Meryl Burbank/Hannah Gill Laura Linney
Marlon Noah Emmerich
Christof Ed Harris
Lauren/Sylvia Natascha McElhone
Introduction
Tagline: All the world’s a stage (line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It)
In this movie, Truman is a man whose life is a fake one... The place he lives is in fact a big studio with hidden cameras everywhere, and all his friends and people around him, are actors who play their roles in the most popular TV-series in the world: The Truman Show. Truman thinks that he is an ordinary man with an ordinary life and has no idea about how he is exploited. Gradually, Truman gets wise. And what he does about his discovery will have you laughing, crying and cheering. www.imdb.com
Awards
Nominated for various awards in the following categories: Supporting Actor (x4), Director (x5), Screenwriter (x5), Actor (x3), Cinematography (x2), Best Film (x7), Special Effects, Supporting Actress, Costume Design,
Won awards for Fantasy Film, Screenwriter (x4), Production, Supporting Actor (x4), Original Score (x2), Director (x3), Actor (x3), Art Direction
Won Golden Globes for Original Score, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in 1999.
Won the David Lean Award for Direction at the BAFTA Awards in 1999.
Won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1999.
Nominated at the 1999 Oscars in three categories.
Nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award for Best Film at the 1999 Broadcast Film Critics Assoc. Awards.
In 1999, Peter Weir was nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures by the Directors’ Guild of America.
Won Screen International Award at the European Film Awards in 1998.
Won Best Foreign Film at two Australian, one Spanish, and one Dutch Film Festival.
Reviews
The Truman Show by Roger Ebert
June 5, 1998 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com
You accept the world you're given, the filmmakers suggest; more thoughtful viewers will get the buried message, which is that we accept almost everything in our lives without examining it very closely. When was the last time you reflected on how really odd a tree looks? Truman works as a sales executive at an insurance company, is happily married to Meryl (Laura Linney), and doesn't find it suspicious that she describes household products in the language of TV commercials. He is happy, in a way, but an uneasiness gnaws away at him. Something is missing, and he thinks perhaps he might find it in Fiji, where Lauren (Natascha McElhone), the only woman he really loved, allegedly has moved with her family…
The trajectory of the screenplay is more or less inevitable: Truman must gradually realize the truth of his environment, and try to escape from it. It's clever the way he's kept on his island by implanted traumas about travel and water. As the story unfolds, however, we're not simply expected to follow it: We're invited to think about the implications. About a world in which modern communications make celebrity possible, and inhuman.
Until fairly recently, the only way you could become really famous was to be royalty, or a writer, actor, preacher or politician--and even then, most people had knowledge of you only through words or printed pictures.
Television, with its insatiable hunger for material, has made celebrities into ``content,'' devouring their lives and secrets. If you think ``The Truman Show'' is an exaggeration, reflect that Princess Diana lived under similar conditions from the day she became engaged to Charles.
Carrey is a surprisingly good choice to play Truman. We catch glimpses of his manic comic persona, just to make us comfortable with his presence in the character, but this is a well-planned performance; Carrey is on the right note as a guy raised to be liked and likable, who decides his life requires more risk and hardship...
Ed Harris also finds the right notes as Christof, the TV svengali. He uses the technospeak by which we distance ourselves from the real meanings of our words. (If TV producers ever spoke frankly about what they were really doing, they'd come across like Bulworth.) For Harris, the demands of the show take precedence over any other values…
I enjoyed ``The Truman Show'' on its levels of comedy and drama; I liked Truman in the same way I liked Forrest Gump--because he was a good man, honest, and easy to sympathize with.
But the underlying ideas made the movie more than just entertainment. Like ``Gattaca,'' the previous film written by Niccol, it brings into focus the new values that technology is forcing on humanity.
Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives--of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.
The Truman Show by Todd McCarthy
April 27, 1998 http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117477427.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0
A gemlike picture crafted with rare and immaculate precision, "The Truman Show" amusingly and convincingly presents a nuclear community as a vast television studio. An outstandingly successful change of pace for comic star Jim Carrey and a tour de force for director Peter Weir, this clever commentary on media omnipotence is unusual enough to be perceived as daringly offbeat for a major Hollywood studio production, although all of its ideas will be perfectly accessible even to the most general audiences. Carrey's youngest and dumbest fans might not get what they crave, but viewers primed for something a bit out of the ordinary will find themselves swept away by the film's ingenious flights of fancy and emotional dynamic.
A fable about a man whose entire life, unbeknownst to him, has been the subject of a staggeringly popular, 24-hour-per-day TV show, pic trades in issues of personal liberty vs. authoritarian control, safe happiness vs. the excitement of chaos, manufactured emotions, the penetration of media to the point where privacy vanishes, and the fascination of fabricated images over plain sight. But as lucid and concentrated as the film's point-making is, its saving grace is its lightness, its assumption that modern audiences are just as savvy about the media as are its practitioners and don't need to have lessons hammered home.
As fresh as "The Truman Show" may seem, Andrew Niccol's original screenplay actually has numerous antecedents, beginning with Paul Bartel's bracingly insidious 1965 short "Secret Cinema," which he later remade as an "Amazing Stories" episode. Viewers may also think of such "filmed reality" pieces as "An American Family," "Real Life" and "Stuart Saves His Family," not to mention MTV's popular "The Real World." But perhaps the strongest flavors stem from Patrick McGoohan's brilliant TV series "The Prisoner," with its pristine, Big Brother-controlled island setting from which the hero felt compelled to escape…
In a superbly executed succession of scenes that employ a variety of lens types and points of view, Truman's daily routine is covered: his jaunty salutations of neighbors, his trip (in invariably ideal weather) to the newsstand and then to his office at a large insurance company. In the course of things, however, slight cracks appear in his life's perfect veneer that arouse his suspicion: Truman sees a homeless man he's sure is his father, and a radio malfunction allows him to briefly overhear the transmissions intended for the "extras" who, in fact, constitute the population of Seahaven and make up the supporting cast for his "life story."
Once the curtain has been raised on the wizardry behind Truman's existence, those around him go into panicky damage-control mode, with his wife and mother trying to sustain his innocence as long as possible. But beginning with an abortive escape attempt and a staged reunion of Truman with his long-lost father, the hand of Truman's "inventor" and manipulator, Christof (Ed Harris), becomes increasingly evident. Directing the most-watched TV show in the world from an elegant perch high above Seahaven, this master conceptual artist and soap opera fabri-cator tries to turn the adversity of Truman's discovery of the truth to the program's advantage. Above all, of course, Truman must not escape, and story's final stretch is devoted to his perilous attempt to cut the strings with which Christof so minutely controls him.
Matching the firm hand Christof maintains on Truman is the absolute rigor Weir and Niccol ("Gattaca") demonstrate in their telling of the story. Every last detail is perfectly in place, every possible thematic innuendo and sly joke is inserted in just the right place and to correctly judged effect. Those who prefer their cinema more spontaneous and less calculated will no doubt blanch, but one can't help but admire the staggering intricacy of what the filmmakers have achieved, and shudder at what less talented artists might have done with similar material.
Dominating the proceedings from start to finish is the visual perfection of the "settings" Christof has created as the backdrop for Truman's life and, by extension, of the film itself. Shooting at Seaside, Fla., Weir and his ace team, led by production designer Dennis Gassner and cinematographer Peter Biziou, dazzlingly reveal a veritable velvet coffin under glass, a "safe" haven that the self-styled benevolent fascist Christof can convincingly argue is "the best place on Earth." Biziou's extensive use of different lenses is particularly noteworthy, and the special effects that are actually part and parcel of the Seahaven lifestyle are all the more effective for their gingerly use.
Occasionally letting fly with some vocal and physical antics, Carrey delivers an impressively disciplined performance that is always engaging and fully expresses the conformist habits and potentially rebellious inner desires of his character. The other dominant actor here is Harris, who carries the final stretches of the picture and is commanding as the man who would be a god. Linney is purposefully arch as Truman's wife, Noah Emmerich is quietly outstanding as the hero's lifelong best friend and confidant, and McElhone vibrantly represents the woman who, from afar, acts as Truman's greatest inspiration and cheerleader.
Film's musical elements are beautifully orchestrated from among Burkhard Dallwitz's original score, rhapsodic elements contributed by Philip Glass and numerous classical excerpts.
Allusions, References and Noteable Notes
Sky Father archetype is a solar deity of creation. His counter-part is the Earth Mother. The Sky Father figures prominently in the Hero’s Journey; typically our Quest Hero has a Sky Father and an Earth Mother. Some examples include: Superman (Jor-El is from Krypton, but Clark was raised by Martha Kent on Earth), Simba (remember that part when Mufasa is in the sky, yeah), Luke Skywalker (Darth Vader, which translates to English as Dark Father by the by, is a god-like figure, separate from human interactions), Jesus (his father who art in Heaven, mother art in Jerusalem), Hercules (Zeus, god, Alcmena, mortal).
The Everyman archetype is when a single person stands for the struggles of humanity – usually these characters are composites of the ordinary; they are often nameless and are meant to be viewed as vessels for the audience’s experience. An essay published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis analyzed Truman as a prototypical adolescent at the beginning of the movie. He feels trapped into a familial and social world to which he tries to conform while being unable to entirely identify with it, believing that he has no other choice (other than through the fantasy of fleeing to a far-way island). Eventually, Truman gains sufficient awareness of his condition to "leave home" — developing a more mature and authentic identity as a man, leaving his child-self behind and becoming a True-man
Product placement, whereby companies and corporations pay to have their products included in television programming for marketing purposes is highly prevalent in reality television. The Writers Guild of America, a trade union representing authors of TV scripts, had raised objections in 2005 that its members are forced to write ad copy disguised as storyline on the grounds that "the result is that tens of millions of viewers are sometimes being sold products without their knowledge, sold in opaque, subliminal ways and sold in violation of government regulations."
In 2008, Popular Mechanics named The Truman Show as one of the ten most prophetic science fiction films. Journalist Erik Sofge argued that the story reflects the falseness of reality television. "Truman simply lives, and the show's popularity is its straightforward voyeurism. And, like Big Brother, Survivor, and every other reality show on the air, none of his environment is actually real." He deemed it an eerie coincidence that Big Brother made its debut a year after the film's release… Weir declared, "There has always been this question: Is the audience getting dumber? Or are we filmmakers patronizing them? Is this what they want? Or is this what we're giving them?”
Truman Syndrome: Ronald Bishop of Sage Journals Online…commented, "In the end, the power of the media is affirmed rather than challenged. In the spirit of Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, these films and television programs co-opt our enchantment (and disenchantment) with the media and sell it back to us.”
Joel Gold, director of psychiatrics at the Bellevue Hospital Center, revealed that by 2008, he had met five patients with schizophrenia (and heard of another twelve) who believed their lives were reality television shows. Gold named the syndrome after the film and attributed the delusion to a world that had become hungry for publicity. Gold stated that some patients were rendered happy by their disease, while "others were tormented. One traveled to New York to check whether the World Trade Center had actually fallen — believing 9/11 to be an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another came to climb the Statue of Liberty, believing that he'd be reunited with his high-school girlfriend at the top and finally be released from the 'show.'"
In August 2008, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported similar cases in the United Kingdom. The delusion has informally been referred to as "Truman syndrome," according to an Associated Press story from 2008
In clinical psychology, voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature. In popular imagination the term is used in a more general sense to refer to someone who habitually observes others without their knowledge, and there is no necessary implication of any sexual interest.