Rube Tube (1998)

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), the hero of Peter Weir's beautifully sinister and transfixing entertainment-age daydream The Truman Show, lives in a storybook island community called Seahaven that's as sunny and immaculate as a tropical postcard. Each morning, he says goodbye to his perky, beaming wife (Laura Linney) and leaves his gilded suburban home, which looks like one of those New Age gingerbread office buildings that began to go up about a decade ago. Arriving downtown, where he works as an insurance salesman, Truman swirls through lanes of traffic nearly surreal in their civility, whisks past perfectly stacked rows of interchangeable magazines, and makes small talk with the locals, who are as chipper as the droids in a candy-bar commercial. Have we entered some creepy parallel universe? Or is Seahaven, with its programmed-cheery settings and programmed-cheery people, its meticulous, Magritte-goes-to-the-mall look of the '90s melting into the '50s and back again, the place America is fast becoming?

Actually, Seahaven is a fake — not a town at all but a gigantic domed television studio, where Truman has spent his entire 30 years as the unknowing star of an intricately rigged TV series, a voyeuristic epic beamed 24 hours a day into homes all over the world. The events of Truman's life are overseen by Christof (Ed Harris), the show's ominous creator-visionary, who sits up in his booth like a network Big Brother, molding everything before him. The streets and buildings of Seahaven are sets (the sun and moon are electronically operated light shows), and the citizens are round-the-clock actors, each equipped with a tiny camera. Even Truman's family and friends aren't what they seem. His buddy (Noah Emmerich), who regularly arrives to share a six-pack, uses macho-guy bonding to create an ersatz intimacy. His wife is a '90s Donna Reed (Linney's overly synthetic character is actually the film's one flaw), and his memory of losing his father in a drowning accident is like a ''haunting'' TV-movie tragedy. Everywhere Truman looks, he's being filmed, observed, scrutinized; the whole world is watching him. Only he doesn't know it. The reason the show is a hit is that although everything surrounding Truman is an illusion, his reactions are innocently, and utterly, real.

The paranoid ingeniousness of The Truman Show brings to mind David Lynch directing a smiley-faced 1984 — that, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers updated to the era of Jerry Springer and The Real World. The film takes off from a culture — ours — that erases privacy by turning reality into television and television into reality. That said, if The Truman Show were just a Twilight Zonesatire of life in the age of ultra-media, it might not have had much resonance. What makes the film a dizzy, transporting experience is the way that Weir, working from Andrew Niccol's nimbly fanciful screenplay, allows us direct access to the eerie virtual reality of Truman's world, which is portrayed as a hyper-clear dream of our own homogenized, theme-parked lives, with everything from catchphrases to love dictated by the prerogatives of corporate central.

Jim Carrey has always been naturally stylized, a man gleefully unleashing his id and watching it bounce around the room. Here, he hasn't let go of that stylization, exactly. He's sculpted it down, reducing himself to the slightly gawky mannerisms of a doofus everyman domesticated beyond his powers, literally raised to be a character on a TV show. As it dawns on Truman that there are vast forces mucking with his life, Carrey's happy smirk curls into a snarl of rage, and he inspires dynamic feelings of audience revolt. What Truman is discovering and fighting, the surreal sense that everything in the world revolves around him, is really the core aesthetic of TV commercials (''This Bud's for you!''), now turned into a madhouse threat. A consumer-age Walter Mitty, he longs to escape, to go to Fiji and reunite with the bewitching coed (Natascha McElhone) he once, for a moment, loved. Unbeknownst to him, she was an actress on The Truman Showwho tried to shake free of her role (and was hauled off by the network fascists). Carrey uses his timing and his ironic sincerity to fuse us to Truman's desperation, turning him into a postmodern Capra hero. We're dying for Truman to break through Seahaven's fourth wall — to become, for the first time, himself.

Weir gently tweaks the viewers who gather at a bar, or over a pizza, to tune into Truman's latest exploits. Those viewers, of course, are us. Watching the movie, we're inside The Truman Showand outside it at the same time. We feel the tug of its drama as surely as anyone on screen, yet we're never allowed to forget that for Truman, romance, friendship, even his own memories are a prefab series of events — a behavior-modification experiment drawn from the situational language of television. It may well have taken a clown genius like Jim Carrey to play someone who wakes up to the notion that his whole life has been a ghostly pantomime. In its ominously witty way, The Truman Show is really asking, What happens to our experience when all we want to be is what we see? That may be the first essential question of the 21st century. A

You Might Also Like

• Video Review The Truman Show | Joe Neumaier
• Movie Commentary EW reviews new Peter Weir reissues (1998) | Jeff Labrecque
• Movie News Meet Rain, the star of these flicks (1994) | Scott Brown
• Movie News Natascha McElhone (1998) | Daniel Fierman
• Movie News Weir Science (1931) | Sandra P. Angulo
• Movie News Winter movies (Nov 03, 2000) | Will Lee