Smile! Your Life's On TV

By RICHARD CORLISS

What a wonderful world Truman Burbank inhabits--a town of pretty houses and smiling people. On Seahaven Island, the streets are spotless, the traffic is orderly, the weather glorious, from seductive dawns (let's get out of bed!) to sunsets worthy of Turner's brush. "Beautiful day, isn't it?" a neighbor asks one predictably fabulous morning, and Truman chirps back, "Always!" He's headed for his honorable job as an insurance salesman, then home to his blond, bedimpled wife Meryl, perhaps off for a late brewski with his best friend, Marlon. You have it all, Truman: good afternoon, good evening and good night! Except for one thing, folks. The whole kit and kaboodle is fake. Truman (Jim Carrey) is the unknowing star of a 24-hour-a-day TV drama that has been aired live around the world for nearly 30 years, since the day Truman was born. Everyone else in town, including Meryl (Laura Linney) and Marlon (Noah Emmerich), is an actor, improvising from a loose scenario devised by the project's creator, Christof (Ed Harris). The Truman Show, as the program is called, is TV's most elaborate prank: Candid Camera on an epochal scale and at a muted pitch. Christof has created the largest man-made structure in history (the huge domed studio that is Seahaven), with a working town, a roiling sea and hundreds of extras, simply to convince one person that his life is real. In this scheme Truman is the human, the one true man. Everything else is...show.

A play within a play, only the player doesn't know he's in it. That's a beguiling idea for a Saturday Night Live skit or one of David Ives' miniature metaphysical farces. But can such a notion sustain a full-length film (even one that clocks in at a svelte 102 minutes)? And will the film satisfy the mass audience's interest in what is, after all, a Jim Carrey Summer Movie?

Yes, yes!, we want to sing out, in one of Carrey's trademark siren wails. As dreamed up by screenwriter Andrew Niccol and realized to sunnily subversive perfection by director Peter Weir, The Truman Show is so verdant with metaphor and emotion that it works on any viewer's level. You will laugh. You will cry. You will be provoked to ask yourself why you feel this way. And for once in a blue moon of movies, you will think. Isn't that one of the best buzzes you can get leaving a multiplex?

In a summer of dinosaurs and meteors--those old rock-'n'-roll, end-of-the world money machines--an eccentric little ($60 million) film about one mild man reaching the end of his 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 man out of his time: "This picture has Gump written all over it."

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.

The 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 directing the show. Weir, like his alter ego Christof, lays the process of magicmaking and manipulation open before us. Here's how we do it, people: music and mirrors.

And 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.

Part of the drama is in the antidrama, the visual geniality of Seahaven. It's a Disneyland dream of cheer and rectitude. The film's light is soothing, beckoning--a near life experience. Its cool glow is so infusive you may feel you're getting a gentle tan as you 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.

One can quibble with Weir's editing; the movie cops out on greatness with a few truckling reaction shots at the climax. And one can question Niccol's vision of the future of TV: not 500 channels nattering to niche markets but one big show binding the world in the bogus bliss of pink-cheeked Americana. And the idea of a program uninterrupted by commercials (Christof makes his money from product placement and ancillary markets) is nearly as naive as Truman. The show is also pretty tame. Unlike most daytime-drama characters, Truman is a faithful husband who has no evil twin and does not suffer bouts of amnesia. For 30 years the show has been a pageant of placidity, a hypoallergenic soap opera where the tension is in the subtext. Will he find out? How's it going to end?

This is the world made for Truman--so serene it's spooky. And eventually, like the hero of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (that potent fable of '50s restlessness that was, in its way, the anti-Father Knows Best), Truman begins to suspect that perfection isn't all it's supposed to be.

Why did a light fixture fall from the sky? Why was he caught in a rain shower only five feet wide? And his wedding photo: Meryl has her fingers crossed! Pod lady or Stepford wife, Meryl has a tang of arsenic in her syrupy voice. And perhaps never in film history has an actress allowed her chiseled dimples to be used so mercilessly against her; the creases in Linney's cheeks seem to be the first fissures in Meryl's crackup.

Truman's trek will take him on a rough sailing to the edge of his universe--so close he can literally touch it--and to the shattering answers to the questions consuming him. This makes The Truman Show a quest movie. Our hero's need to know himself and his place in the universe gives the viewer a passionate rooting interest. But like any supple parable, the film allows for several plausible interpretations. It is also about control--the control we try to exercise over ourselves and others, using stratagems of love, hope and fear. Most people think they have something to do with shaping their existence. But what if that's a fiction? Who's directing our lives? And how do we negotiate with God or fate or the great TV auteur in the sky? Finally, the film speaks to man's isolation from the world around him. The solipsist believes that he is the only reality; everything else is just...TV.

Niccol, a young New Zealander, wrote the script in 1993, and wrote and directed last year's swank science fable Gattaca, which has much the same story (in the near future, one human man is surrounded by handsome humanoids). Niccol says the only source material he needed for The Truman Show was his own paranoia. "I often felt people were lying to me," he declares. But as the '90s devolved into media spectacles of Bronco chases, freeway suicides and Jerry Springer grudge matches, the conceit of TV as worldwide psychodrama seemed prescient. "I used to think the idea was ludicrously farfetched," Niccol says, "but now I have to wonder."

Niccol sold his spec script to the world's savviest producer, Scott Rudin (In & Out, Clueless, The First Wives Club), who took it straight to Carrey. "Jim had the kind of madness the project needed to ultimately get made," he says. "And his warmth was a hedge against a movie that could have been on the cold side and needed someone with audience sympathy."

The original script was set in New York City. When Niccol teamed with Weir, they changed the scene to Seahaven (much of the film was shot in Seaside, a Florida resort community), where everyone loves Truman because, well, they're paid to. Says Niccol: "We decided to make him a prisoner in paradise." He toyed with various endings--Truman stumbles into a Truman Burbank memorabilia shop, Truman is reunited with his lost love, Truman decides he loves life on TV--and finally devised the current ending, nicely abrupt and ambiguous. "We felt the viewer could write a better ending of the next years in Truman's life," says Weir.

In a movie about acting, the actors had a great time building elaborate back stories for their characters under the guidance of Weir, known as the Chiropractor for his ability to help actors stretch their craft. Linney's and Emmerich's takes on Meryl and Marlon are so rich that one would like to see alternate versions of the film just to catch up on their ambitions and angst.

But the key was always Carrey's take on the main character. "Truman isn't the man next door," says Weir. "He's someone who was brought up by wolves and lived in a nest of liars. The people around him were ambitious actors, and all his life they were leaning in very close to him. There was a lot of grinning by overfriendly people trying to gain his influence. Thus he has a very public persona, an exaggerated external self." The director could be describing the Jim Carrey who in 1994 had emerged from supporting status into the heat of celebrity and sycophancy. Weir also detected "something alien about Jim, an 'otherness' that worked."

It worked because Carrey performed self-scrutiny that amounted to a makeover. The Chiclet festival of his smile is often used to undercut an opponent or close the sale of a gag. Here, modified by a few watts, it is a beacon of innocence, vulnerability. Except for Mom and a couple of wives, has anyone before thought of the Carrey face as beautiful? In this film it surely is. That's star quality and craft in tandem, the gift of recapturing innocence even as the movie recaptures the ability of the best old Hollywood films to work as metaphor and magic. Together, Carrey and The Truman Show leave the viewer with a spectral feeling that somehow warms: the shiver of radiance.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles