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![]() By Hadley Hury JUNE 15, 1998: The Truman Show is, indeed, a more interesting entertainment than a number of films released thus far in 1998. It is not, contrary to its marketing hype, a defining moment in cinema history or some profound socio-historical revelation for the millennium. The central conceit of Andrew Niccols screenplay that a man has, since birth, lived as the unwitting star of a 24-hours-a-day world-broadcast television show is original and fraught with potential for examining the impacts of television in our lives, our art, and our society.
Peter Weir, a seductively imaginative director, provides some compensatory resonance for Niccols script, but cannot rescue it, in the end, from the cerebral anemia that keeps it from being as thought-provoking as one wants it to be. Like the artificial life in Trumans hometown of Seahaven, the risk-taking of this film is, ironically and annoyingly, stifled; just as Truman has been programmed not to trust himself in the outside world, so we, the audience for The Truman Show, have not been trusted enough by its makers to want to think further. In much of its pre-release marketing ballyhoo and in numerous interviews, the writer and director have touted the fact that they are proud of having managed to wrangle out of Hollywood the first big-budget art film. What they seem to have wrangled is a product that cheats both halves of its promised hybrid persona. The tone of the film is wildly uneven and the pace, at times, deadly. One can appreciate the goal and the effort and enjoy much of this film without being inspired to join lemming-like queues buying Truman dolls or the cocktail party psycho-babble comparing the film with Sartre or Kierkegaard. (A far stronger argument might be made for the integrity of vision and the imaginative realization of the heros quest theme in Tim Burtons superb Pee Wees Big Adventure.)
Even if it is substantially a what-might-have-been proposition, The Truman Show may be one more popular encouragement to continue our conversation about the radically shifting lines between art and life, medium and message, ordering influence and random reality, reportage and passivity, human consciousness and virtual existence. The final scene is brilliant almost teleological and memorable, far more effective thematically than much of the wan, sophomoric philosophizing for which most of the film settles. It is the occasional moment like this that makes one realize that The Truman Show is afflicted with the very outrage that plagues its hero its trapped by an exhilarating concept that atrophies through underdevelopment; it doesnt let our minds or our souls breathe. Like the small, circumscribed, calculated, regimen of Seahaven The Truman Show is just good enough to make you angry that it isnt a lot better. A Perfect Murder, a well-made, stylish thriller starring Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo Mortensen, suggests that the battle is already over and that we are passing irredeemably into the 21st century as soulless, immoral creatures motivated sheerly by greed, lust, and a need to decorate the howling void of our pathetic existence with pretty objects.
Paltrow plays the much-younger wife of a gonzo broker whose sense of ownership defines him. They have great art and the most drop-dead gorgeous Central Park apartment in recent film history. She is his primary treasure: Aside from being a svelte blonde who works as a translator at the U.N. when shes not lunching at LEtoile, she has a $100 million trust fund and no pre-nup agreement. She is also having an affair with a downtown artist her own age. As her husbands business schemes begin to tank, his acquisitiveness takes a deadlier turn. To describe any more of the plot would break the cardinal rule of film reviewing. Suffice to say that Paltrow and Mortensen are well-cast, the twists are engrossing, the cinematography sensual, the art direction handsome. The richest treat in this gilded cage of forbidden pleasures is Michael Douglas in his strongest, most richly detailed performance in years. As the well-tailored Machiavelli, he makes cold charm irresistible. He exudes shrewdness, power, and an elegantly managed need to control. Hes regally, impeccably, loathsome.
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