Meet Truman Burbank. He is 30, a mild-mannered, well-intentioned man who lives with his perpetually perky wife, Meryl, on the wonderful island of Seahaven, a squeaky-clean, homogenised environment where the bonhomie of the inhabitants reflects the sunniness of the year-round perfect weather. "Seahaven voted planet's top town," boasts the front-page headline on the local paper, The Island Times. "A nice place to live," declare the local licence plates.
Truman's unvarying daily routine involves trading banal banter with neighbours and acquaintances and working for an insurance company where there is mild pressure to achieve better results. Whenever there's a problem, Truman can rely on his best friend, Marlon, to turn up promptly, sixpack in hand, to deliver soothing bonhomie and homespun advice. Truman has never known anywhere other than Seahaven. When he was seven, he watched helplessly as his father drowned in a boating accident, instilling in the boy a phobia which prevents him travelling on or over water. Seahaven is the only world he knows. And if that seems too good be true, well, that's because it is. In fact, Seahaven is one huge, fabricated fake, an entire town built as the set for what has become the world's most popular television show, its voyeuristic appeal attracting more than 1.7 billion viewers in 222 countries. Many viewers leave it on all night for comfort, we are told.
The only inhabitant of Seahaven who is not in on this colossal artifice is the show's subject, Truman Burbank himself, who is blithely unaware that his life is the subject of a round-the-clock television show which began with his birth. He was an unwanted baby chosen to star in this massive project by a television producer known only as Christof. Explaining the genesis of the series and its appeal, Christof says audiences were becoming bored with actors and pyrotechnics. "There's nothing fake about Truman," he says. "It's genuine. It's a life."
It's a life stolen at birth, manufactured and manipulated down the years as the global viewing figures rocketed, and a life where everything Truman imagines as real is utterly bogus. Everyone else in Seahaven is an actor or an extra - even the people he believes to be his mother, his wife and his best friend.
All the actors and extras wear concealed micro-cameras - just some of the 5,000 cameras set up all over the town - and they wear ear-pieces to take direction and prompts down the line from Christof. Even the idyllic weather is a special effect. "Easy on the fog," Christof cautions. "Cue the sun."
But even a well-ordered, meticulously planned production such as this can go awry, and after 30 years Truman Burbank's suspicions are aroused and it finally begins to dawn on him that nothing is what it seems.
This is the intriguing premise for Peter Weir's fascinating postmodern picture of our media age in The Truman Show, which opened in the US last week and is shaping up as one of the major critical and commercial successes of the year. The ingenious, highly original screenplay is the work of Andrew Niccol, a 34-year-old New Zealander who turned director last year with a more austere picture of millennial paranoia in the underestimated Gattaca. Too clever and complex to fit into the formulaic demands of the Hollywood studios, the Truman Show project was in gestation for more than three years, going through regular rewrites until Weir finally got to shoot the film for Paramount Pictures. The distributors remained nervous about the film, delaying its release several times in the past 10 months. "Paramount Pictures had some major perception problems to deal with on The Truman Show, which was first pulled from release last summer and then from the Christmas schedule," the trade paper Screen International noted this week. "But all fears proved groundless last weeekend as the movie proved as popular with audiences as with critics, who have lined up to name it the year's best movie. It grossed a spectacular $31.5 million on 2,315 screens, notching up a terrific box-office average of $13,625."
When Weir cast Jim Carrey in the pivotal part of Truman Burbank, the news initially provoked disbelief in the film business, given that Carrey had built his career on his elastic-limbed clowning and deliberate over-acting in lowbrow comedies such as the two Ace Ventura movies and Dumb And Dumber. But Hollywood acknowledges the adage that every clown wants to play Hamlet, and as Carrey's comedies had generated hundreds of millions of dollars at the international box-office, there was a willingness to allow him to prove himself as a serious actor. If he failed, after all, he could go right back to fart jokes and rolling his eyes manically.
While Weir admits he had to keep a tight rein on Carrey's propensity for mugging at times during shooting, he has elicited from his star a remarkably subtle, expressive and - most amazingly - quiet performance. The US critics concur. "Carrey's raw, life-size performance will surprise you," wrote Jeff Giles in Newsweek. "A gemlike picture crafted with rare and immaculate precision," raved critic Todd McCarthy in Variety, it marked "an outstandingly successful change of pace for comic star Jim Carrey". And in Esquire, critic David Thomson, describing the film as "the movie of the decade", said "the project is unthinkable without Jim Carrey".
A more qualified opinion was expressed by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. He felt the film "is slightly too charmed by its own conceit", although he added: "It must be said that The Truman Show is as bright as hell and more smoothly provocative than the rest of the summer movies strung together."
On Carrey's transformation, Lane observed: "To me, the spectacle is admirable but painful: he looks like a drunk who is not only making do with Pellegrino but pretending that he likes the stuff." One of the few firmly dissident voices was that of New York critic David Denby, who turned his review into an attack on the high-profile New York Times columnist and former theatre critic, Frank Rich, who had eulogised the movie. However, the same magazine put Carrey on the cover for a feature in which Chris Smith hailed it: "The Truman Show is that rare mainstream movie, like Easy Rider, Network and Thelma & Louise, that is perfectly timed with the Zeitgeist."
Demanding - and rewarding - a willing suspension of disbelief, Weir's superb film makes for consistently accomplished, thoughtful and stimulating cinema. It is rich, imaginative, precisely sustained and admirably detailed in the execution of its concept, eschewing heavy-handedness and ostentation.
In a film dealing so directly with the manufacturing of emotions, Weir and Carrey brilliantly pull off a memorable sequence which starts out setting up fake emotions and ends up tapping into the emotions of the audience, which in turn takes Truman's emotions as authentic. While its purpose is fundamentally serious, the film is peppered with unexpected, ironic humour, and never more hilariously than when Truman's wife, offering him cocoa, turns the scene into a blatant piece of product placement.
Weir, the pre-eminent Australian director - whose admirable body of work includes Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Year Of Living Dangerously, Witness, Dead Poets Society and Fearless - elicits astutely judged performances from a cast which, in addition to Jim Carrey, notably features Laura Linney as Truman's wife, Natascha McElhone as a high school friend who wants to save him, Noah Emmerich as his best friend, and especially Ed Harris as the callous Christof.
The aforementioned Network, in its media exploitation of the unhinged TV news anchorman played by Peter Finch, is the most obvious of the film's fictional antecedants which also embrace Quiz Show, the works of Frank Capra and David Lynch, and the television series, The Prisoner, The Real World and The Larry Sanders Show.
Weir's film opens with the credits of The Truman Show, the television series within the film - now on 10,909th day - "starring Truman Burbank as himself", followed by the credit, "created by Christof". The smug, omnipotent Christof's self-image as a kind of God-like figure is enforced later when he declares, "I am the creator" pausing dramatically before adding, "of a television show".
Last Saturday, within 24 hours of seeing The Truman Show, I felt an odd resonance on reading a Guardian profile of the England football squad's manager, Glenn Hoddle, which, in discussing his religious beliefs, noted how Hoddle "likened God to a film director and life to a movie". In its Orwellian picture of contrivances and illusions, The Truman Show is rife with resonances and allusions. We live on the edge of a millennium in a world where surveillance cameras film us daily on the streets and in stores.
This is an era of wall-to-wall, fly-on-the-wall television which purports to take us behind the scenes of police stations, airports, hospitals (human and animal), driving schools, neighbourhood feuds, cruise liners and opera houses. An era in which the camera goes into the courtroom to film the minutiae of the O.J. Simpson or Louise Woodward trials, or on to the streets for hours and hours on end to observe people mourning the death of Diana, or across the world to Baghdad to bring the Gulf War into our living rooms, or out on the streets of Los Angeles to capture on film television's first live suicide, then re-run the footage over and over in the guise of analysis. An era awash with sensationalised confessional radio and television talkshows where the impressionable and those hungry for their 15 minutes of fame tell millions of viewers secrets they could not tell their closest friends or relatives. An era when personal privacy is dismissed with contempt by large sections of the media, and where images are manufactured if they do not exist. An era which may well have its real-life Christof wannabe in the person of Rupert Murdoch.
Perhaps The Truman Show does not require all that much suspension of disbelief after all.
The Truman Show is scheduled for release in Ireland on October 24th