Jim Carrey stars in The Truman Show as Truman Burbank, a 30-year-old insurance salesman who has unwittingly starred in a 24-hour-a-day documentary about his life since the moment of his birth. Truman's wife, Meryl (Laura Linney), his mother, Angela (Holland Taylor), his best friend, Marlon (Noah Emmerich), and everyone else he knows are actually just actors playing roles in a long-running television production. Seahaven, the picture-postcard of a town Truman lives in, is actually an elaborate soundstage with 5,000 cameras poised to capture Truman's every action. All of this is overseen by the documentary's creator and director, a self-satisfied manipulator named Christof (Ed Harris). The picture's premise is that Truman's life has become a national obsession, with people watching videotapes of treasured moments from the past and gathering in bars to watch current developments. Given Truman's white-bread existence, I can't imagine why this might be true.

The narrative in The Truman Show is generated by Truman's sudden suspicion that his life is not normal. One of the lights from Seahaven's dome falls from the "sky" and lands at Truman's feet. More seriously, the actor who played Truman's father and supposedly died in a boating accident when Truman was a child sneaks back on the set disguised as a bum. At first, Christof's minions try to hustle him away, but eventually they allow a reunion and, in parody of stock soap opera formula, tell Truman his dad has been suffering from amnesia. Christof has long tried to invest Truman with phobias that would keep him from venturing outside Seahaven; now Christof fundamentally imprisons his star as Truman makes repeated attempts to flee.

My primary beef about all this concerns the film's weakly developed premise. Marlon tells an interviewer that the show isn't really fake, just controlled. And that indeed must be the case. But if it has been so tightly controlled before, why is it breaking down now? Once we ask that question, the whole concept starts to crumble. Just how is it that Truman's "father" manages to sneak onto the set? Long before that, how did Christof control all the child actors who played Truman's schoolmates? In a flashback scene, we're shown studio thugs strong-arming a young woman named Lauren (Natascha McElhone) who, of course, is really an actress named Sylvia. Sylvia has committed the sin of flirting with Truman when Christof has scheduled a romance with Meryl instead. But given Sylvia's rebellion, why does Christof allow Sylvia to remain in the production long enough to warn Truman that his life is artificial? And for that matter, where's the camera when this warning takes place? Moreover, if Christof can get the warning on film, why does it take him so long to have Lauren/Sylvia's "father" arrive to announce that their family is moving to Fiji? Afterwards, Truman pines for the girl he knew as Lauren, but he seems to forget completely what she's told him. Why is that? In this episode and others, viewers seem eager for Truman to learn the truth and escape. Why, then, is there no public outcry at the cruelty of subjecting an innocent man to such an elaborate hoax?

Then there's the whole business of Meryl, an actress we're asked to believe fully well intends to have a child with Truman even though she actually can't stand him. How much do you have to pay someone to take a role like this? And how does an actor in a role like this have a private life to enjoy her salary? How, for instance, do vacations work for her? Indeed, why is Truman even married to Meryl? He doesn't seem to like her, either. So how did Christof manage to arrange their marriage without Truman rebelling against it?

Even though his life is fake, Truman thinks it's real. It's one thing for Christof to control Truman's environment down to the people with whom he lives and associates. But if he can't control Truman at age 30, how has he controlled Truman until age 30?

Weir and screenwriter Andrew Niccol presumably want The Truman Show to be a canny indictment of the pervasive role the television medium plays in our lives. But this picture doesn't offer any fresh insights, nor is it particularly clever. The film can't even make up its mind about the nature of its villain. Christof is deeply misguided, but he's neither as malevolent as he might have been nor quite redeemable. He's manipulative and selfish, but not nearly as ruthless as we first suspect. A movie like this begs the viewer to contemplate its metaphysics. You don't name a character Christof if you don't want people to puzzle over the nature of God and God's relation to man. But there's nothing here other than a paean to human free will. Few of us have endured lives so utterly blessed that we haven't on some occasion challenged God's authority by blaming Him for our misfortune. Thus, we understand Truman's defiant cry of, "Is that the worst you can do?" But I shudder at contemplating Christof as Weir and Niccol's concept of a weak, self-centered and inhumane divinity.