Word: truman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world may not seem to have much going for it. And Carrey's core audience of boys who like to talk through their butts could be a hard sell for a film in which the megamanic star is an actor, for Pete's sake. But The Truman Show is the best kind of risk: make a good movie and see who comes. And Carrey will be waiting for them, with a performance of profound charm, innocence, vulnerability and pain. The early word on Truman is so positive that one exhibitor dares to invoke a hit 1994 film about another...
Soon enough, other films will have Truman on their mind. Ron Howard's Ed TV is about a fellow plucked from obscurity who becomes a star when his life airs live on a 24-hour cable series, and Gary Ross's Pleasantville is about a couple of siblings who get stuck in a '50s sitcom. Shades of Groundhog Day: sophisticated variations of media-bent virtual reality...
...standard film has no such lofty ambitions. It takes its audience on a familiar ride. Actors pretend to be heroes or villains doing amazing or funny things. And we, in an implied compact with the filmmakers, pretend it's real. In The Truman Show the rules are more complicated. We are watching a movie that purports to be a TV show and that we (along with everyone else but Truman) know is fake. Occasionally we watch "viewers" of the show, in their home or a bar, reacting to some dramatic moment. And at times we watch Christof and his crew...
...still--in, for example, a scene that reunites Truman with his long-absent father--the film reaches an improbable emotional intensity. The two men hug; the folks in a bar cheer; Christof cues the swelling music and crinkles with paternal pride; and the grand fakery of it all works its sorcery on the heart. In one scene you get the truth in an actor's lie, the art in the oldest melodramatic tricks, the gotcha! of cinema's power to create a simpler, more beautiful world on screen. This is pure moviemaking, naked and irresistible...
...watch the film. This could be a spiffy updating of TV's first great Springfield--the setting for that archetypal '50s idyll Father Knows Best--rather than the wildly twisted suburbia of Homer Simpson or the Armageddon-arsenal Springfield of Kip Kinkel. The only weapon flaunted in The Truman Show is a dicer-peeler-grater...