Man trapped in his own soap

BY MARTIN SPAIN

It's great to be able to thoroughly recommend a movie. The Truman Show is an intelligent, innovative, engaging and witty work, which even manages to draw a non-irritating performance from Jim Carrey. He plays one Truman Burbank, an unprepossessing 30-year-old with a pretty wife and an average job who has been the subject of a 24-hour-a-day television show from even before he was born.

Unlike President Clinton's current wall-to-wall coverage, however, Truman's media nightmare is unwitting and not of his own making. He lives in the white-picket-fence American town of Seahaven, somewhere off the mainland, but he has never left the island. The plot centres on his growing realisation that all is not as it should be, indeed that the whole facade of his life is a sham, peopled with actors and directed from without. He has had glimpses of the sham in the past, most significantly when he fleetingy met with his true love in high school, played by Natascha McElhone, who tried to open his eyes to the conspiracy.

As the movie progresses, we learn more and more of the full horror of such total control of an individual's life, via flashbacks to episodes in Truman's past, which are also available to the Truman Show's vast audience on video.

Ed Harris turns in a fine performance as Christof, the show's creator and master, for whom the on-air conception of Truman's successor is a priority, for himself as much as for the ratings. The movie offers a blackly comic look at some of the less savoury aspects of modern society, particularly in terms of personal freedom in an age of greater and greater invasion of privacy and television's power as a medium through which people can live their lives vicariously.