I was sat next to group of four
teenagers when I watched The Truman Show
in the cinema in Winchester when it was released in 1998. As the film was
starting, one of them leaned across to his friends and whispered, “This is a
comedy, isn’t it?”
Oh, dear.
Jim Carrey was no overnight
success. He’d been slogging away in minor roles for fourteen years until he hit
the big time with the zany but, in my opinion, unfunny antics of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. His performance
in that film did, however, cause critics to compare him to that other
rubber-faced clown of the 1950s and 60s, Jerry Lewis. The Mask soon followed, with the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber (with Carrey and Jeff
Daniels as probably the best comedy double-act of the 1990s) hot on its heels. The Truman Show did have its fair share
of humour but, in his first dramatic role, Jim Carrey gave an emotionally
charged performance of surprising depth and sensitivity as Truman Burbank, a
man happy in the world he is living until a succession of small events begin to
shatter his perfect life and challenge the reality of his own existence.
It’s an idea that could have come straight
from the writings of Philip K. Dick, whose marvellous novels and short stories
played with perceptions of reality and what it is to be human. The most obvious
comparison, though, can be traced back to Patrick McGoohan’s groundbreaking and
hallucinatory TV series The Prisoner,
which is still jaw-droppingly brilliant almost fifty years after it was first aired
to an unsuspecting public in 1967. Viewers at the time were expecting something
akin to Danger Man, McGoohan’s gritty
and hugely popular series about a secret agent. But McGoohan and his script
editor George Markstein had different ideas and their vision of a man trapped
in a village where there is no escape divided the viewing public into those who
loved it and those who hated it. Many viewers were confounded by its surreal
premise, but at the tender age of 13, I loved it, although I didn’t fully
understand what it was getting at and it was only when I watched it again many
years later that I came to appreciate what a masterpiece of paranoia and
helplessness it was. It’s a series that will be watched by generations to come
and is best seen on the beautifully restored Blu-ray edition.
Whilst they are both prisoners, the
difference between McGoohan’s No. 6 and Carrey’s Truman Burbank is that No. 6
knows why he is trapped in The
Village, whilst Truman is unaware
that he has been trapped on Seahaven Island for his entire life. Truman
Burbank, you see, believes he is a normal man with a normal job, but he is in
fact the star of a global TV phenomenon that has been beaming his life story
around the world to billions of viewers since his conception.
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| Original UK poster |
The brainchild and producer of this
façade is Christof, played by the ever dependable Ed Harris, who has his base
of operations in a fake moon in the Seahaven night sky. Along with a large team
of technicians, he controls the daily lives of the residents (all actors) and
the events that revolve around the unwitting star. Christof can be seen as a
benign version of Orwell’s Big Brother from 1984,
only wanting what’s best for his star (usually the best camera angle or
emotional reunion), or as a tyrant, controlling the lives of those around him –
even willing to let Truman drown at sea rather than allowing him the
opportunity to escape to freedom.
Directed by Peter Weir, who created
a huge impact with Australian cinema audiences with Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli,
and scripted by Andrew Niccol, who wrote and directed the equally excellent Gattaca (1997), The Truman Show is a thoughtful and incise film about the power of
media manipulation and product placement and its light touch disguises a darker
and more paranoid undertow. It’s also a film that gets better and better with
subsequent viewings.
Jim Carrey wasn’t the first comedy
actor to move successfully into drama. Jerry Lewis would move effortlessly into
dramatic roles as the disgruntled TV host in Martin Scorcese’s brilliant study
of the trappings of celebrity, The King
of Comedy (1982) and as Oliver Platt’s overbearing father in Peter Chelsolm’s
jet black comedy drama Funny Bones
(1995). In 1989, Peter Weir also provided Robin Williams with his first
dramatic role, as the unconventional English teacher John Keating, in Dead Poets Society. Jim Carrey would go
on to give other impressive dramatic performances, most notably in Frank Darabont’s
The Majestic (2001) as a blacklisted
amnesiac Hollywood film writer in 1951 on the run from HUAC (House Unamerican
Activities Committee), and especially as a man trying to retrieve the memories
of his girlfriend in Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s mindbendingly awesome Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(2004). He can also be seen in Alexandros Avranas’ upcoming crime thriller True Crimes, written by Kevin
MacDonald’s long-time collaborator, Jeremy Brock.
The Truman Show was, by far, the most original movie of that year,
loved by critics and audiences alike, and I was dumbstruck when the Oscars came
around to find that it and its director, writer and two stars, Jim Carrey and
Ed Harris, did not received a single
nomination. But that doesn’t really surprise me about Hollywood. Alfred
Hitchcock, the man who invented a lot of the modern cinematic techniques we see
today, never received an Oscar for best director for any of his films throughout
his long and illustrious career. When you consider that Rocky won the Oscar for best picture in 1976, ahead of Alan J.
Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Sidney
Lumet’s Network and Martin Scorsese’s
Taxi Driver, all vastly superior
films, you know that there was something wrong and the voting panel must have
all been suffering with some kind of mental illness. Martin Scorsese was shamefully
ignored by the Academy for years, as was Steven Spielberg. Then again, American
audiences were not ready for many of the films released during the golden age
of Hollywood. Frank Capra’s It’s A
Wonderful Life (1946), Billy Wilder’s Ace
in the Hole (1951), Charles Laughton’s Night
of the Hunter (1955) and Hitchcock’s Vertigo
(1958) were all flops at the American box office when they were released,
although they were embraced by European audiences who were obviously more
intelligent. But thanks to cinema’s nemesis, television, they gained a new,
younger audience, through late night screenings who recognised them for the
classics they so obviously are and they are now, thankfully, rightly regarded
as such.
Like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show will be watched by
generations to come. And rightly so, because it’s a wonderfully constructed,
beautifully acted, thoughtful and original cinematic marvel. It’s also Peter
Weir’s masterpiece.
