This is a nice Cannes Film Festival poster, but Peter Weir‘s The Truman Show (’98) is no masterpiece. I disliked it from the get-go. Jim Carrey‘s “Truman Burbank” is unaware that he’s living inside a corporate-funded, hermetically-sealed reality TV dome. This is what modern life feels like to tens of millions of actual Americans, of course, so we all get the metaphor. But I found the premise impossible. Complete disengagement.
I’ve posted the following two or three times over the last decade, but here goes again: Despite the impossible-to-swallow premise, The Truman Show could have saved itself if it had gone with a darkly ironic ending.
Weir’s film ends with Truman escaping from the dome and finally about to experience the blessings and pitfalls of real life…hallelujah! A far more satisfying ending would have been for Truman to escape into the real world and then, after a few difficult weeks or months, returning to the dome because he can’t hack the difficulty of real life — too much anxiety, trauma and heartbreak.
The final scene would show Truman embracing Ed Harris‘s “Cristof” and Laura Linney‘s “Hannah Gill” and shedding tears of joy at being able to return to the shelter of Fake World — a realm that tens of millions of actual Americans live in today.
