The Truman show: who is watching you?

  The whole world gets passionate for the more-than-true story of Truman Burbank. From his birth to his wedding, passing by his first tooth and his graduation, his private life is nothing except our own entertainment. Spied by more than 5000 movie cameras 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, Truman leads a peaceful existence in the city of seahaven, without even knowing that his world has been created from scratch, and that all around him is fake, from the sunset he admires every evening to the fellows he lives with. The Truman show is the biggest and most realistic Real TV show ever imagined, and the first one that stars a real human being in his entire private life, from his birth to his death. Or maybe not...

  If you remain fed up with Jim Carrey’s perpetual mimics and jokes, this movie is the perfect way for  you to change your mind. He shows here another side of his playing, more dramatic, deep and touching. Playing a doubtful adult persuaded that his life is not really what it seems, but unable to really point out what the problem is despite the evidences accumulated, he offers an impressive performance, marked by a mix of different feelings: despair, suspicion, doubt, sadness, will of adventure, sometimes aggressiveness. Only a really great actor could be able to express with such intensity so many complex feelings. 

  If Jim Carrey surprises a lot in this movie, Ed Harris, in the role of an ambitious and obsessional real TV show director, shows his talent for playing tortured and complex characters. “We've become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn't always Shakespeare, but it's genuine. It's a life.” Christof, creator and director of the show, remains a decisive protagonist. Taking advantage of the impressive trend that real TV shows represent, he imagined this crazy project. In one way really attached to Truman, that he saw growing up exactly as a father, in the other way cruel and impassive, the character is this kind of person you don’t know if you have to pity or to hate.

 

    With this extreme version of a real TV show, the Writer Andrew Niccol tries to envisage the bad effects the trend of this kind of programs can bring to. Since the launching of the “big brother show”, in Netherlands in 1999, real TV shows appeared all over the world always more and more elaborated. If the candidates at least agree to participate, the rules become more and more cruel. Maybe one day, the creation of tis kind of project will be effective, and no way back would be possible. Thanks to the talent of the director Peter Weir, Truman’s loneliness, panic and his feeling of imprisonment remain perfectly perceptible. The spectator identifies to the character. Maybe it is the best way to persuade minds that this must never happen.

  In conclusion, a perfect and surprising casting in a movie well-written and genially filmed, about a modern and disturbing story that encourages us to think about a contemporary issue, make of the Truman show one of the most successful movies of the 90’s.