Peter Weir
The Truman Show

The Truman Show

Original title: The Truman Show

Director: Peter Weir

Cast: Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney

Music: Philip Glass, Burkhard Dallwitz

Production: USA 1998

Genre: drama, comedy

Duration: 103 minutes

Plot:

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) spends or rather thinks he is spending a peaceful and affluent life in Seaheaven. One day, however, he discovers that this idyllic picture is a setup, a soap opera staged in a gigantic television studio. The protagonist of this show? None other than Truman Burbank himself.

Review

We are used to seeing Jim Carrey in silly and comedic roles like in “Scemo & + scemo” (1994), but in The Truman Show, he offers us his best performance, in fact, he will win the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic Film. This is an enjoyable movie but it hides an important existential message within, what if we were living in a dream, in a fiction? Is the reality this one in which we live? The world in which Truman lives turns out to be a television set, how would we feel if suddenly we discovered that our best friend or our wife were just actors? This film contains an important reminiscence of Pirandello’s “Il Fu Mattia Pascal”. In the final scene of the film, Truman with the Santa Maria boat (in memory of Columbus) creates a tear in the sky since it's obviously a scenic element; this is the exact moment when Truman understands his condition. The Sicilian writer will speak to us about this tear, considering the episode of the Oresteia in which Orestes is undecided whether to kill his mother; then advised by Pilade (Apollo's voice), he will kill her. But what Pirandello wants to underline in “Il Fu Mattia Pascal” is, imagine if after killing the mother, the sky tore; what would be the behaviors of Orestes and above all Apollo? He maintains that we are the directors of our own lives and this is what Peter Weir also emphasizes in this film. Ed Harris, who masterfully plays the role of Christoph, the director-demiurge of the show, after various attempts to stop Truman, gives up and interrupts the live broadcast. The director of “Dead Poets Society” then stages a sharp and dazzling metaphor of the influence of the media, starting however from a completely different perspective than that of reality TV. The Truman Show is an exaggerated representation of the consequences that a media-dominated society generates in the audience at large and thus on the individual.

Truman's wife's name is Meryl like the famous actress Meryl Streep and his best friend's name is Marlon like the famous Marlon Brando.