SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
Truman Burbank lives an unassuming small-town life, unaware that every movement in his life is anything but ordinary. His wife, his friends, the people on the streets he walks on everyday know something that is secret to Truman, and his quest to understand what is happening to him may affect the lives of people around the world. Burkhard Dallwitz composed the bulk of the score to Peter Weir’s brilliant film, but Glass contributed two key new pieces, alongside the use of tracks from Mishima. The composer even makes a brief cameo in one scene, playing a piano.
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Film critics and preview audiences occasionally experience something extraordinary: they get to see a film absolutely cold, before it is written about, discussed, excerpted and trailered into ubiquity, before their friends feel unable to keep themselves from re-narrating the best bits. I feel extremely lucky to have walked into a preview of The Truman Show several months ago completely ignorant of its story. By now, most inquisitive filmgoers will already know the central conceit: Truman Burbank, to all appearances a 30-year-old insurance salesman in a superficially happy marriage, is unaware that he’s also the star of a TV show. Consequently, they will be robbed of the aesthetic bliss of seeing, like Truman himself, the trick revealed piece by piece.
Despite the reservations voiced elsewhere about the film’s philosophical depth, there’s no denying that director Peter Weir shows his hand and conceals it with charming dexterity. The film gives it all away at the start with an opening ‘credits sequence’ for the series-within-the-film, but it’s easy not to understand what’s going on. Truman’s wife Meryl (Laura Linney with sinister, apple-cheeked irony) calls Truman’s existence and her own ‘a truly blessed life’. The series’ creator Christof (dressed all in black like a cross between a coke dealer and a kabuki stagehand) explains that, ‘Nothing you see here is faked. It’s merely controlled.’ (This omniscience recalls the hippie-transcendent notion that ‘everything happens at exactly the right time’ in Weir’s first feature Picnic at Hanging Rock, which now seems like an eerie pre-echo of The Truman Show.) Gradually, we realise the extent of this control and that the darkened, weirdly angled shots are not affected cinematic mannerisms from Weir and Co, but subjective views of cameras within the diegesis. By the time Meryl is extolling, with an unnatural degree of enthusiasm, the virtues of a slicing-peeling-paring kitchen gadget (which will become a comical weapon later on) many viewers tuned into the insincere, television tone-of-voice that cues product placement will already have ‘got it’.
Yet even if you know The Truman Show’s big joke, there are many lesser ones to savour. As with the kitchen gadget, the film delights in showing the hidden, evil nature of innocuous props and set dressing: the outsize moon (scale is wonderfully skewed here – look out for the gag about Mount Rushmore) is Christof’s observation deck; the too-friendly, floppy-eared dog next door turns into a snarling attacker when the town goes looking for the missing Truman. Echoing the dome that encases this world, much play is made out of circles and cycles and repetitions: a golf ball is used to explain that Fiji, where Truman’s true love is meant to have flown, is so much on the other side of the world that ‘you can’t get any further away before you start coming back.’ Similarly, it’s in a revolving door that Truman’s rebellion begins.
Of course, a major paradoxical gag is the casting of Carrey in the lead, his character endowed with a first name that’s just a bit too much of an allegorical nudge. He is an actor who has built a career on a kind of manic insincerity, which made him perfectly suited if irritating as a lawyer who’s jinxed into telling the truth for a day in Liar Liar. Here, he’s supposed to be the only ‘sincere’ person in his world, the only one who’s not lying (although he later learns deception). And yet, with his gestures large as if he’s trying to touch the outsized moon, his smile a row of blank Scrabble tiles, there’s a sense even in the earliest scenes that he’s performing for the cameras – which would be logical for someone around whom life had been choreographed since he was an infant.
What makes Carrey’s self-regarding, class-clown persona so useful to the film is that it buttresses perhaps its most central theme: solipsism. Many have read The Truman Show as an allegory of how television obsessively watches us, of Bentham-Foucault’s panopticon gone digitally out of control. What’s more poignant and haunting is that it’s really about how we all secretly want to be on television and see ourselves as the stars of our own home-life movies; it is impossible to leave the cinema after seeing The Truman Show and not, at some point, wonder if the world is watching, not experience a flicker of identification with Truman (who has already been rehearsing different roles in front of his mirror every morning, before he becomes aware of the plot around him).
This is nothing new. Solipsism is one of the defining tropes of literary modernism, threading through Joyce’s Ulysses and most of Nabokov’s work, Borges’ fiction and almost every book by Philip K. Dick. But cinema and television have appropriated the theme with problematic results. In a book, the reader is always aware that a single authorial presence is playing puppetmaster; writing itself is a solipsistic process. Film’s collaborative nature tugs it into the social realm. What is more, it seldom comfortably accommodates purely subjective viewpoints. We gradually come to realise that these weird shots of Truman in the beginning are the cameras’ views of him, but who is filming Christof in his observatory? What being watches Sylvia watching Truman inside her flat?
Still, The Truman Show is a moving exploration of creation-anxiety, of the fear and hope that in a post-Darwinian world the only beings with real power are distant public figures and malevolent unknown forces ringfencing our capacity for free will. Solipsism haunts us because it’s both a comfort and a terror to think that someone, something has laid all this on for us, but in fiction like The Truman Show characters get to make the last moves. I won’t give it away here, but the conclusion of the film is both satisfying and chillingly ambiguous: Truman and the viewers get to decide – to paraphrase the series’ tagline blazoned on buttons and T-shirts worn by the show’s viewers – how it’s going to end.
Leslie Felperin, Sight and Sound, October 1998
THE TRUMAN SHOW
Director: Peter Weir
Production Companies: Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions
Executive Producer: Lynn Pleshette
Producers: Scott Rudin, Andrew Niccol, Edward S. Feldman, Adam Schroeder
Co-producer: Richard Luke Rothschild
Unit Production Managers: Richard Luke Rothschild, Joseph P. Kane
Production Auditor: Crystal A. Hawkins
Location Manager (Florida): Andrew Ullman
Location Manager (L.A.): Christopher Trott
Post-production Supervisor: Rosemary Dority
2nd Unit Director: Micheal J. Mcalister
1st Assistant Director: Alan B. Curtiss
Script Supervisor: Wilma Garscadden-Gahret
Casting: Howard Feuer
Written by: Andrew Niccol
Director of Photography: Peter Biziou
Camera Operator: Don Reddy
Visual Effects Supervisor: Micheal J. Mcalister
Special Visual Effects: Inc Cinesite
Digital Compositing: The Computer Film Company
3D Matte Paintings: Matte World Digital
Additional Visual Effects: Available Light Inc, EDS, Stirber Visual Network Inc
Boat Effects Designer: Peter Chesney
Special Effects: Larz Anderson
Special Atmospheric Effects: Bolan Jet Air
Graphic Designer: Eric Rosenberg
Computer Displays: Neil Clark
Editors: William Anderson, Lee Smith
Additional Film Editing: Kevin D. Ross
Production Designer: Dennis Gassner
Special Design Consultant: Wendy Stites
Art Director: Richard L. Johnson
Set Designers: Thomas Minton, Odin R. Oldenburg
Property Master: Douglas Harlocker
Costume Designer: Marilyn Matthews
Jim Carrey’s Costumer: Robert Mata
Make-up Artist Supervisors: Ron Berkeley, Brad Wilder
Jim Carrey’s Make-up Artist: Sheryl Ptak
Hairstylist Supervisors: Bette Iverson, Hazel Catmull
Jim Carrey’s Hairstylist: Anne Morgan
Titles: Cinema Research Corporation
Tru-Talk Title Sequence Design: Imaginary Forces
Opticals: Pacific Title
Original Music by: Burkhard Dallwitz
Additional Original Music by: Philip Glass
Music Editor: Bunny Andrews
Sound Design: Lee Smith
Production Sound: Art Rochester
Boom Operators: Linda Murphy, Randy Johnson
Re-recording Mixers: Phil Heywood, Martin Oswin
Dialogue Editosr: Tim Jordan, Andrew Plain
Effects Editors: Rick Lisle, Peter Townend
Stunt Co-ordinator: Pat Banta
Animals Provided by: Birds and Animals Unlimited
Animal Trainer: Cheryl Harris, Tammy Blackburn
Cast
Truman’s World
Jim Carrey (Truman Burbank)
Laura Linney (Meryl)
Noah Emmerich (Marlon)
Natascha McElhone (Lauren/Sylvia)
Holland Taylor (Truman’s mother)
Brian Delate (Truman’s father)
Blair Slater (young Truman)
Peter Krause (Lawrence)
Heidi Schanz (Vivien)
Ron Taylor (Ron)
Don Taylor (Don)
Ted Raymond (Spencer)
Judy Clayton (travel agent)
Fritz Dominique, Angel Schmiedt, Nastassja Schmiedt (Truman’s neighbours)
Muriel Moore (teacher)
Mal Jones (news vendor)
Judson Vaughn (insurance co-worker)
Earl Hilliard Jr (ferry worker)
David Andrew Nash (bus driver/ferry captain)
Jim Towers (bus supervisor)
Savannah Swafford (little girl in bus)
Antoni Corone (security guard)
Mario Ernesto Sánchez (security guard)
John Roselius (man at beach)
Kade Coates (Truman, four years)
Marcia DeBonis (nurse)
Sam Kitchin (surgeon)
Sebastian Youngblood (orderly)
Dave Corey (hospital security guard)
Mark Alan Gillott (policeman at power plant)
Jay Saiter, Tony Todd (policemen at Truman’s house)
Marco Rubeo (man in Christmas box)
Daryl Davis, Robert Davis (couple at picnic table)
R.J. Murdock (production assistant)
Matthew McDonough, Larry McDowell (men at newstand)
Joseph Lucus (ticket taker)
Logan Kirksey (TV host)
Christof’s World
Ed Harris (Christof)
Paul Giamatti, Adam Tomei (control room directors)
Harry Shearer (Mike Michaelson)
Una Damon (Chloe)
Philip Baker Hall, John Pleshette (network executives)
Philip Glass, John Pramik (keyboard artists)
The Viewers
O-Lan Jones, Krista Lynn Landolfi (bar waitresses)
Joe Minjares (bartender)
Al Foster, Zoaunne Leroy, Millie Slavin (bar patrons)
Terry Camilleri (man in bathtub)
Dona Hardy, Jeanette Miller (senior citizens)
Joel Mckinnon Miller, Tom Simmons (garage attendants)
Susan Angelo (mother)
Carly Smiga (daughter)
Yuji Okumoto, Kiyoko Yamaguchi, Saemi Nakamura (Japanese family)
USA 1998
103 mins
Digital 4K
SHIFTING LAYERS: THE FILM SCORES OF PHILIP GLASS
Koyaanisqatsi
Tue 6 Aug 18:20; Sat 24 Aug 12:50; Mon 26 Aug 11:30 BFI IMAX
Powaqqatsi
Wed 7 Aug 20:40; Sat 24 Aug 15:20
Naqoyqatsi
Thu 8 Aug 18:20; Sat 24 Aug 18:00
The Truman Show
Thu 8 Aug 20:30; Sat 10 Aug 18:30
The Illusionist
Fri 9 Aug 20:30; Thu 29 Aug 18:10
UK Premiere: A Place Called Music + Q&A with director Enrique M. Rizo
Sun 11 Aug 15:15
The Hours
Sun 11 Aug 18:00; Mon 26 Aug 17:30
The Philip Glass Effect
Wed 14 Aug 18:10
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Wed 14 Aug 20:20
Dracula (Philip Glass Special Edition)
Thu 15 Aug 18:10
Visitors + UK Premiere: Once Within a Time
Thu 15 Aug 20:10; Tue 27 Aug 17:50
Notes on a Scandal
Fri 16 Aug 18:30; Thu 29 Aug 20:40
Jane
Sat 17 Aug 20:40; Sat 31 Aug 15:10
Kundun
Sun 18 Aug 18:00
The Thin Blue Line
Mon 19 Aug 18:10
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Mon 19 Aug 20:30; Mon 26 Aug 20:10
Candyman
Fri 23 Aug 18:20
Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent
Fri 23 Aug 20:40
With thanks to
Richard Guerin, Director of Orange Mountain Music
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
Questions/comments? Contact the Programme Notes team by email