Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol's parable, made before reality TV. Jim Carrey's first serious lead, and the film that predicted the next twenty-five years of American entertainment.
Truman Burbank is a thirty-year-old insurance salesman who lives in the picturesque coastal town of Seahaven. He has a wife, a best friend, a daily routine. He does not know that his entire life is being broadcast — that Seahaven is a vast television-studio dome, that everyone he knows is an actor, that 5,000 hidden cameras have been recording him since birth, that hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide tune in to The Truman Show each day.
The film follows Truman's gradual realisation that the world is wrong. A studio light falls from the sky in the opening sequence. His wife pitches products into the camera. His dead father reappears as a homeless extra. Truman tries to leave Seahaven. The film's third act is his sail across the studio's artificial sea to the painted wall at the dome's edge.
The Truman Show was released on 5 June 1998. The first season of American Big Brother aired in July 2000. Survivor premiered in May 2000. The American reality-TV genre that the film satirised did not yet exist when the film was made. Andrew Niccol had written the screenplay in the early 1990s, originally as a darker, more thriller-oriented project; Peter Weir's direction softened the tone into the parable form.
What the film predicted — the way personal lives would become consumable entertainment, the way audiences would identify with a single performer-subject's emotional arc, the way commercial product integration would saturate the entire frame of a televised reality — is now so familiar it's hard to remember the film was the prediction. The Kardashians, the Real World franchise, the YouTube lifestyle vlog, the parasocial relationships between streamers and audiences — Niccol's screenplay is the foundational text of all of these.
Carrey had, by 1998, made Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Liar Liar — broad comedies that paid eight-figure salaries. The Truman Show is the film in which he proved he could carry a non-comedic feature. The performance is built on Carrey's gift for physical expressiveness, but the expressiveness is being used in service of a character who does not know he is being watched and whose performance is, therefore, paradoxically without performance.
Carrey won the Golden Globe for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy). He was not nominated at the Oscars. The Oscar omission is widely considered one of the more-debated snubs of the late 1990s; Carrey's later performance in Man on the Moon (1999) was also not nominated. He has, to date, never been nominated for an Academy Award.
Ed Harris plays Christof, the director-creator of The Truman Show. Christof's framing of the project — that Truman has been given a 'paradise' in exchange for the loss of his autonomy, that the world outside Seahaven is too dangerous and corrupt for someone of Truman's innocence — is the film's most-disturbing argument. It is the argument every surveillance-capitalist platform makes about its users.
The film's final scene — Truman, on the boat at the edge of the dome, choosing to step through the door into the unknown rather than accept Christof's offer to stay — is the film's central moral act. The choice is staked on the value of free will over comfort. The film does not show what happens to Truman after he leaves. The film's defenders argue the elision is the point; the film's critics argue it lets the parable off too easy.