Certainly an ambitious and intriguing concept for a film story: Truman is the first baby to have been purchased by a corporation and made the central character of a reality show - his entire life has been surreptitiously filmed inside a gigantic dome which covers a small manufactured town on the shore of (supposedly) the ocean. Truman (grown up as Jim Carrey) himself does not know that he is filmed every moment of his days and broadcast to the rest of the world. All the other inhabitants of the town and including his immediate family are paid actors of the show. Then, being an unpredictable human being, Truman starts to cause potential trouble by yearning to leave his limited surroundings, traveling to exotic places. He's also fixated on the memory of a young woman he met during his college days, a woman who in reality was one of those opposed to this whole set-up and had tried to warn Truman of the true nature of his existence. Truman's feelings of dissatisfaction are exacerbated by his loveless marriage to a woman (Laura Linney) who had been foisted on him - of course, she's just another actress and therefore his marriage is all a sham.
The one responsible for this entire scenario is the enigmatic Christof (Ed Harris), the creator of the TV show and also much like a godhead figure. His central control base is situated up above in the fake moon and he & his employees watch over the proceedings like benign overlords. The plot is jumpstarted one day by one of those unexpected malfunctions, an overhead light fixture falls from the fake sky (the sky is falling!). Later, Truman catches sight of his supposed dead father (a bum - in reality the actor sneaking back onto the set) and notices another careless error, and so begins to have paranoid thoughts - only he is not paranoid, just beginning to suspect the truth. The most clever thing about the story are the many subtle (and not so subtle) ways that Christof and the show runners try to dissuade Truman from wanting to leave his comfortable surroundings - they instill a fear of water in him since childhood and continually drop hints about the dangers of airlines, for example.
Though this is all a wild idea, it was inspired by one of the short TV episodes of the eighties
Twilight Zone series, titled
Special Service, in which the same concept was done on almost no budget. I'm also surprised at how mainstream and conventional is the direction of Peter Weir, who is usually quite eclectic in style. It's as if the subject matter - reality TV - dictated his approach. In the same vein, Carrey as Truman is slightly disappointing; he has limited range and doesn't deliver on the nuances that a better actor might have produced. But, the story is consistently entertaining and you find yourself wondering how Truman's saga will end. The big question here is why would a TV show about an average guy and his average life sustain a worldwide following 24/7, justifying the incredible expense of such an endeavor (the dome is big enough to see from orbit). The answer, this film says, is that many people find comfort in the illusion of spending time with a non-threatening friendly figure like Truman as a fake buddy and that voyeurism is an integral part of human nature; Christof knew this and benefited from it. Did Truman..? BoG's Score:
7.5 out of 10Truman Trivia: the concept has some superficial parallels to Stephen King's
Under the Dome (novel and TV series), just that the dome in King's work was transparent and dropped over about the same area without the consent of the people.
