Monthly Archives: September 2015

  • The Truman Show

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Weir (1998)

    I didn’t get The Truman Show when I first saw it, a few years ago, and I don’t get it after a second viewing.  Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is a man who lives, and has always lived, in a constructed reality television show.  Selected for this unique role at birth and now in his thirties, Truman doesn’t realise that his wife Meryl (Laura Linney) is in fact an actress called Hannah Gill, playing Meryl; that every person he meets on the street or at work or wherever is pretending to be that person; that his home town of Sea Haven is a giant set.  The show’s creator and executive producer is a blonde-haired, vaguely android character called Christof (Ed Harris).  He controls Truman’s existence – Christof has, for example, devised various means of discouraging Truman from wanting to venture out of Sea Haven.  Truman Burbank’s life – ‘The Truman Show’ – is filmed by thousands of hidden cameras and broadcast live, around the world, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  All of a sudden, things start happening that cause Truman to become suspicious about the ‘reality’ of his world:  a theatrical light falls from the artificial morning sky; his car radio picks up a conversation in which the television show’s crew are talking about Truman’s movements.  While it’s surprising that no such technical issues have obtruded previously, during several decades of live transmission, it’s easier to accept this than other aspects of Truman’s troubled awakening:  why, for example, does he only now notice that Meryl tends to advertise – showily, as if to a television audience – the products she buys for their home?  His doubts grow, in spite of assurances from his best friend, Marlon (Noah Emmerich).

    The Truman Show was widely admired on its original release.  The powerful growth of reality television in the years since has conferred on Peter Weir’s science-fiction social comedy, written by Andrew Niccol, the added lustre of inspired prophecy – the words ‘It’s just like The Truman Show’ are not unknown, even though the show within the movie doesn’t at all suggest what you think of as the best-known examples of reality TV.   A major factor in the success of something like Big Brother ­– when it started, anyway – was surely its curious marriage of truth and falsity, the spectacle of ‘real’ people doing things both mundane and contrived.  The stars of this kind of show were unusual because they were ‘ordinary people’ – people hitherto deemed not interesting enough to absorb or entertain television audiences.  The arguments continue as to how much reality TV exploits those who appear on it but the participants do understand, at least superficially, what they’re involved in.  (They also tend to become less watchable as they become more aware of their public image and of the camera.)  At one point in The Truman Show, the increasingly suspicious protagonist, wondering if others in his world are fakes, admits, ‘It’s hard to tell – they look just like regular people’.  Of course, to him, they do – but, to the film audience and surely to a significant part of the television audience for ‘The Truman Show’, the typical inhabitants of always sunny Sea Haven, with their toothpaste smiles, look less like ‘regular people’ than like characters in a satire of hygienic small-town, white picket-fence suburban  America:  The Truman Show is filmed in the style not of a recording of real life but of a cinema movie making the satiric points about media manipulation and distortion that this one seems to be making.

    Weir cuts occasionally to viewers of ‘The Truman Show’ – a man in his bathtub, the regulars in a place called Truman’s Bar – but it’s not very clear, if they’re watching Truman’s life continuously, what they think, for example, of his suspiciousness and growing resistance – and when, in due course, he wants to escape from the world in which he comes to realise that he’s trapped.  These viewers cheer when he eventually does escape but is that an expression of their own resistance to the concept of the show or just rooting for their favourite TV character?   As the crisis around the show grows, one of its producers says, ‘We can’t let him die on live TV!’, although that’s surely what the audience would expect in the fullness of time.  It seems meant to be a telling satirical moment when, at the height of Truman’s rebellion, the show’s ratings go through the roof but I couldn’t understand why.  It would be natural – when Christof decides he has no option but to halt transmission temporarily, for the first time in the show’s long history – for this to attract people who didn’t normally watch the programme.  It’s harder to understand why there’s little indication in the film that ‘The Truman Show’ has been the subject of cultural and moral controversy and debate.   The answer may be that Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol want to concentrate on the follies and evils of mass entertainment but the picture they paint of these is very incomplete.  At the close of the film, when the plug has finally been pulled on ‘The Truman Show’, two dumb-looking men arrive on screen; one says expressionlessly to the other, ‘What’s on the other side?’, or words to that effect – a cheap shot at gogglebox mindlessness.  Weir and Niccol never acknowledge, however, that consumers of mass entertainment are capable of fickleness:  the show appears to have been an uninterrupted hit, without significant changes to its format, for generations of TV viewers.  Another oddity of the film is that, although it may appear to address mass-media manipulation, it often feels to be more about ganging up on a single individual.   Everyone but its leading man knows how ‘The Truman Show’ works; virtually everyone except Christof – including some other members of his production team – appears to exult in Truman Burbank’s eventual freedom.   In defence of his brainchild, Christof claims that the show ‘gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions’.  Putting these words in his mouth may be effective in exposing Christof as a pretentious charlatan but doesn’t fit with Weir’s and Niccol’s more persistent implication that Truman Burbank’s extraordinary life has become merely part of the ordinary life of the audiences who watch him round the clock.

    A concept like ‘The Truman Show’ might seem welcome in hugely increasing the employment rate within the acting profession although it’s remarkable that, during the show’s three decades or so, there seem to have been fewer problems of cast members wanting to leave and try something different than in the average successful TV soap.  The playing in the film is a curate’s egg.  Almost needless to say, the hyperactive Jim Carrey’s Truman seems less ordinary than anyone in Sea Haven:  dressed, for reasons I didn’t get, in clothes more eccentric than those of the other townspeople, Carrey dominates The Truman Show but his presence contradicts the concept of ‘The Truman Show’.  He stands out from the crowd so emphatically – and there’s no rationale for his doing so – that it’s hard to believe Truman Burbank would be popular, except among television viewers who never ceased to enjoy the sophisticated oddness of observing a real life being lived by someone who seemed less real than all the people pretending to be real around him.   Laura Linney, even though she’s made up as if for a comedy sketch spoofing bright-and-shiny American consumerism, has a naturalness that places Meryl Burbank/Hannah Gill more convincingly on the cusp between fiction and reality.  (Have the names Meryl and Marlon, which do have a certain cinematic connotation, been deliberately chosen?  If so, what does this signify?)   Natasha McElhone is Sylvia, cast in the show as Truman’s first and truest love, Lauren.  Sylvia is quickly kicked out when she tries to reveal the truth of his life to Truman – she starts a ‘Free Truman’ campaign, which doesn’t appear to catch fire.   It’s ironic and unfortunate that McElhone, when Sylvia is trying to get the message across to Truman, seems most like an actress in a standard TV drama.  Ed Harris has undeniable sinister authority but his best, most surprising moment comes in his expression of Christof’s keen interest – when Truman tries to break out of Sea Haven – in what’s going to happen next.  Paul Giamatti, keeping his feelings from his bosses but giving the viewer an idea what they might be, is outstanding in his small role as the TV control room director.

    14 September 2014

     

     

  • Perfume:  The Story of a Murderer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom Tykwer (2006)

    It was both interesting and disappointing to see the first name on the screenplay – Andrew Birkin, author of the superb late 1970s BBC mini-series The Lost Boys (and the subsequent book J M Barrie and the Lost Boys).  Birkin, who shares the writing credit for Perfume with Tom Tykwer and the producer Bernd Eichinger, never gets close to a satisfying dramatisation of the famous Patrick Suskind novel, published in 1985.  For what feels like a good twenty minutes or more, the film is merely voiceover narration (by John Hurt), accompanied by illustrations of the words being spoken.   The images are frequently arresting but the film is motorless and fails, once the voiceover has been largely jettisoned, to develop any other kind of narrative line.   The murderer of the title is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a young man who has a superhuman sense of smell (but is himself odourless).  In a quest for the perfect scent, he kills virgins, and tries to preserve their scent from their newly dead bodies.  You might think from that synopsis that Perfume had the makings of a distinctive, entertaining horror film but Suskind, if Wikipedia is to be believed, had larger ambitions for the novel, which is about ‘identity, communication and the morality of the human spirit’.  It appears that Tykwer, Birkin and Eichinger wanted to make a movie of similar pretension; perhaps it was respect for the original that paralysed their adaptation.

    Photographed by Frank Griebe, Perfume, set in eighteenth-century France in the town of Grasse, is never less than remarkable to look at.  The tones and textures are rich and the lighting gives them an extraordinary clarity (even though I was watching the film on television).   If I knew more about art history I expect I could have seen particular artists and their works in many of the compositions:  as it is, I couldn’t do more than notice that, for example, the corpse of Grenouille’s first victim evokes art gallery images of cadavers – thanks to the expertly differentiated flesh tones and the anatomical objectivity of the camera.  But although the visuals are impressive, their aestheticising effect reinforces the emotional anonymity of Perfume – except for a single early sequence.  The film opens with the protagonist’s being sentenced to death; Tykwer then goes into one long biographical flashback, starting with Grenouille’s birth in the street market where his mother works.  A montage of severed fish and animal parts incorporates shots of the bloodied newborn and links him with these other damaged organisms.  Unlike most of what follows, these images have a pungent, disgusting force that communicates itself almost odorously.   I’ve not read the book but I guess its power may depend considerably on Suskind’s making the reader experience the olfactory.  This screen adaptation demonstrates, among other things, that film struggles to realise smells the way that prose can.

    Playing the perfumier Giuseppe Baldini, Dustin Hoffman (with an amusingly imprecise accent) enlivens things briefly but Alan Rickman, as a rich man called Richis, who’s terrified that his daughter will be Grenouille’s next victim, is tedious – Rickman is surely one of the least paternal actors imaginable.  As the Bishop of Grasse, David Calder is even worse.  (Perfume is naff as historical drama and even worse in its occasional satirical moments, with the church predictably on the receiving end of the satire.)   Sally says that Grenouille in the book, in spite of his amphibian name, is animal-like.  Ben Whishaw, who plays him, suggests a faun but there’s no bestial quality and, as a serial killer, Whishaw isn’t remotely menacing.  Nevertheless, he looks more effective than he sounds:  his dimwit-Cockney street urchin voice suggests Lee Evans.  By the time it ended, I’d come round to thinking Perfume might have been altogether better as a silent film.  Tom Tykwer marshals the crowds well enough but their rhubarb-rhubarbing is pathetic and the acting in the smaller parts rarely extends beyond the broadly visual.  In the absence of a narrative voice, a complete lack of spoken dialogue might have made sense of the exaggerated expressions of emotion of the supporting cast, and the overelaborate score by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil.   A silent treatment might, in other words, have helped the audience to feel more – perhaps even smell more.

    8 April 2011

     

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