楚门的世界 The Truman Show 英文影评 review by Kevin Lally

楚门的世界 The Truman Show 英文影评review by Kevin Lally
2008-03-14 23:11:23 来源：Internet 浏览次数：2903 文字大小：【大】【中】【小】
简介：Jim Carrey proved he could play it straight (well, at least a portion of the time) as a family man in Liar Liar, his 1997 comedy blockbuster. With The Truman Show, the elastic-faced, loose-limbed dyna ...
Jim Carrey proved he could play it straight (well, at least a portion of the time) as a family man in Liar Liar, his 1997 comedy blockbuster. With The Truman Show, the elastic-faced, loose-limbed dynamo shows he can also be as serious as needed, in the title role of this imaginative tale of an electronic-age guinea pig. Screenwriter Andrew Niccol, whose directing debut, Gattaca, cautioned against the potential tyranny of genetic advances, again finds reasons for paranoia in technological progress, as an innocent named Truman Burbank becomes the unknowing, all-consuming subject of a 24-hour television network. Niccol's unconventional fable is superbly realized by director Peter Weir (Fearless, Dead Poets Society, Witness), who fashions a disorienting visual style to fit the artifice and pent-up anxiety of Truman's world.
Niccol and Weir shrewdly immerse the audience in this oddly cheerful environment, without immediate explanations of what's really going on behind its sunny fa‡ade. Truman lives with his wholesome wife Meryl (Laura Linney) in a picture-perfect house in the squeaky-clean island community of Seahaven, where he works for a large insurance firm. His days pass by uneventfully, until a series of incidents shake him out of his complacency: A huge piece of lighting equipment falls out of the sky. A homeless man appears who looks just like Truman's dead father. Strange radio transmissions, like stage directions, come out of his car radio. For the first time, Truman begins to suspect that something is rotten in Seahaven.
Nearly halfway through the film, we learn the truth: Since birth, Truman has been watched by a phalanx of hidden cameras, his every waking move transmitted to an increasingly addicted, international television audience. Seahaven is actually the world's largest studio set; the sky, the ocean, the stars and the sunsets are fakes, and the weather is controlled by outside forces. What's more, everyone Truman encounters in his daily routine is an actor-even his wife and his best friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich) are on the payroll. This enormous charade is the handiwork of Christof (Ed Harris), a megalomaniacal conceptual artist who sees nothing wrong with the mass-appeal social experiment he's concocted.
Christof has kept Truman from puncturing the boundaries of his world by staging a childhood boating accident in which the boy's father apparently drowned; Truman has been deathly afraid of the water ever since. The other key incident in Truman's life was unplanned-a budding romantic affair with a 'college student' who tried to spill the secret of Seahaven, but was suddenly sent away to the island of Fiji (or so Truman believes).
The Truman Show begins just before this fantasy world begins to crumble, following a long and profitable run for Christof and his network backers. Niccol cannily maintains our involvement throughout, first by keeping the action shrouded in mystery, then by giving us a strong rooting interest in Truman's poignant quest for identity and freedom. It's an ideal role for Carrey: Truman's freakish situation offers him several dramatically valid opportunities to cut loose in the patented Carrey fashion, while maintaining the essential humanity of this socially deprived Everyman. In career terms, the part of Truman Burbank is an important turning point for this gifted comedian.
The Truman Show strains credibility, however, in its cynical view of a world that embraces what is, after all, a rather cruel and disturbing experiment. Granted, the daily spectacle of audiences cheering brawls and fistfights on 'The Jerry Springer Show' proves we haven't come far from the Roman Coliseum era, and the public's salacious interest in scandals ranging from O.J. to JonBenet Ramsey reveals a whopping insensitivity to personal tragedy. But The Truman Show, despite its attempt to put an upbeat final-act spin on its hero's struggle, takes it as a given that the world would look in on Truman's unwitting imprisonment without much more than a few scattered protests.
This one important caveat aside, Weir and Niccol have come up with a bracingly original cinematic experience, an eerie but entertaining vision of one man's struggle against a high-tech Big Brother he doesn't even know exists. Dennis Gassner's hermetically sealed production design and Peter Biziou's resourceful cinematography make a perfect fit with Weir's lively, lyrical directing style. It may be Jim Carrey's show, but he shares the bill with some equally daring high-wire walkers.
楚门的世界 The Truman Show 英文影评review by ROGER EBERT
2008-03-14 23:12:33 来源：Internet 浏览次数：1277 文字大小：【大】【中】【小】
简介：``The Truman Show'' is founded on an enormous secret that all of the studio's advertising has been determined to reveal. I didn't know the secret when I saw the film, and was able to enjoy the lit ...
关键字：楚门的世界 The Truman Show
The Truman Show'' is founded on an enormous secret that all of the studio's advertising has been determined to reveal. I didn't know the secret when I saw the film, and was able to enjoy the little doubts and wonderings that the filmmakers so carefully planted. If by some good chance you do not know the secret, read no further.
Those fortunate audience members (I trust they have all left the room?) will be able to appreciate the meticulous way director Peter Weir and writer Andrew Niccol have constructed a jigsaw plot around their central character, who doesn't suspect that he's living his entire life on live television. Yes, he lives in an improbably ideal world, but I fell for that: I assumed the movie was taking a sitcom view of life, in which neighbors greet each other over white picket fences, and Ozzie and Harriet are real people.
Actually, it's Seaside, a planned community on the Gulf Coast near Tampa. Called Seahaven in the movie, it looks like a nice place to live. Certainly Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) doesn't know anything else. You accept the world you're given, the filmmakers suggest; more thoughtful viewers will get the buried message, which is that we accept almost everything in our lives without examining it very closely. When was the last time you reflected on how really odd a tree looks? Truman works as a sales executive at an insurance company, is happily married to Meryl (Laura Linney), and doesn't find it suspicious that she describes household products in the language of TV commercials. He is happy, in a way, but an uneasiness gnaws away at him. Something is missing, and he thinks perhaps he might find it in Fiji, where Lauren (Natascha McElhone), the only woman he really loved, allegedly has moved with her family.
Why did she leave so quickly? Perhaps because she was not a safe bet for Truman's world: The actress who played her (named Sylvia) developed real feeling and pity for Truman, and felt he should know the truth about his existence. Meryl, on the other hand, is a reliable pro (which raises the question, unanswered, of their sex life).
Truman's world is controlled by a TV producer named Christof (Ed Harris), whose control room is high in the artificial dome that provides the sky and horizon of Seahaven. He discusses his programming on talk shows, and
dismisses the protests of those (including Sylvia) who believe Truman is the victim of a cruel deception. Meanwhile, the whole world watches Truman's every move, and some viewers even leave the TV on all night, as he sleeps.
The trajectory of the screenplay is more or less inevitable: Truman must gradually realize the truth of his environment, and try to escape from it. It's clever the way he's kept on his island by implanted traumas about travel and water. As the story unfolds, however, we're not simply expected to follow it: We're invited to think about the implications. About a world in which modern communications make celebrity possible, and inhuman.
Until fairly recently, the only way you could become really famous was to be royalty, or a writer, actor, preacher or politician--and even then, most people had knowledge of you only through words or printed pictures.
Television, with its insatiable hunger for material, has made celebrities into ``content,'' devouring their lives and secrets. If you think ``The Truman Show'' is an exaggeration, reflect that Princess Diana lived under similar conditions from the day she became engaged to Charles.
Carrey is a surprisingly good choice to play Truman. We catch glimpses of his manic comic persona, just to make us comfortable with his presence in the character, but this is a well-planned performance; Carrey is on the right note as a guy raised to be liked and likable, who decides his life requires more risk and hardship. Like the angels in ``City of Angels,'' he'd like to take his chances.
Ed Harris also finds the right notes as Christof, the TV svengali. He uses the technospeak by which we distance ourselves from the real meanings of our words. (If TV producers ever spoke frankly about what they were really doing, they'd come across like Bulworth.) For Harris, the demands of the show take precedence over any other values, and if you think that's an exaggeration, tell it to the TV news people who broadcast that Los Angeles suicide.
I enjoyed ``The Truman Show'' on its levels of comedy and drama; I liked Truman in the same way I liked Forrest Gump--because he was a good man, honest, and easy to sympathize with.
But the underlying ideas made the movie more than just entertainment. Like ``Gattaca,'' the previous film written by Niccol, it brings into focus the new values that technology is forcing on humanity.
Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives--of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.。