The Truman Show - 1998 film review

I watched The Truman Show not too long after its original release in 1998 and loved it. Now that 'reality TV' has become omnipresent on the schedules, I thought it was worth taking another look to see if it still stands up well after more than a quarter of a century. The short answer is that it does, and that it still offers far more in terms of thought-provoking entertainment than any reality TV show I've ever heard of.

The concept is brilliant in its simplicity, as well as in the fact that quite a few people will be tempted to identify with the psychology of Truman Burbank's situation. He is a young man who lives in the delightful island of Seahaven, blissfully unaware that he is the star of a globally popular reality TV show and that all the people who surround him are actors. However, the truth slowly starts to dawn on him, much to the dismay of the show's creators, who devise all kinds of (often very amusing) ways to deter him from trying to escape from the wholly artificial world - full of product placement - in which he lives.

The Truman Show is a great film because it works extremely well on more than one level. There are some genuinely funny scenes, as well as some that are quite poignant. Jim Carrey is at his very best as Truman, while Andrew Niccol;s script is excellent. Apparently the director Peter Weir persuaded Niccol to shift his approach from purely dystopian to something more nuanced and humour-laced, and this works very successfully.

I must say that I am not a fan of reality TV and I avoid it whenever I can. But of course it's hard to escape and so I have seen quite a few examples (even though I've never managed to stomach a complete episode of Big Brother or its variants). It seems to me that it's better described as 'unreality TV'. There's something unpleasant and arguably unhealthy about a lot of it; certainly real life seems to me to be too interesting and valuable to fritter much of it away on that kind of stuff. The Truman Show exposes the shallowness of this particular form of entertainment, but it does so in a way that is appealing rather than preachy. Unlike any reality TV shows that I'm aware of, this film has stood the test of time.