Reviews

Peter Weir's earliest major films -The Last Wave, Picnic at Hanging Rock --are studies of people overwhelmed by circumstances they can't understand or control. But his later films offer hope of redemption and triumph. Like Dead Poets' Society, the Truman Show is the story of struggle for freedom from an oppressive system. While "DPS" was an interesting development of a standard situation (a liberal-minded teacher helps students free their minds from tradition through creative literature) the Truman Show is based on a very unique setup. The main character, Truman Burbank, is the only "true man" in a TV-show world of actors and commercial advertising. We, the viewers, discover this truth before he does because Weir introduces us to a selection of viewers who are hooked on the show. The film holds our interest by showing us, first, Truman's process of discovery, and then his attempts to escape his situation.

A lot has been made out of the supposed religious elements of the Truman Show, presumably because of the "Christof-Christ" name parallel (a bit too cute, don't you think?). But to turn the film into a religious allegory misses the obvious: the film is about the line between fake and real, and how television destroys humanity by hooking us on images in order to sell products. The key line in the film is (Truman to Christof): "You never had a camera in my head!" You can't say that about God. Second, the real Christ was a rebel (as in the confrontation with the money-changers) who was killed by the system. If you want a Christ image in the Truman Show, it's Truman "walking on water" at the end of the film, not the lord of commercialism chillingly played by Ed Harris.

If there's a deeper philosophical message in the film, it has to be the rejection of the postmodern idea of how we know what we know. Truman lives in a world that's been created for him. A postmodernist (i.e., pretty much anyone teaching in the literature or history department of my university) would say that we accept the world we're given. What we "know to be true" is what we are told is true. My "truth" depends entirely on the culture I live in and the categories of thought I'm provided with. On this basis, Truman should never escape Seahaven. But human intellect and curiosity exist precisely to question and change categories of thought. So, Truman's quest for the truth involves observing both anomalies (a falling stage light, odd patches of rain) where there should be consistency, and patterns (bicycle, flowers, Beetle!) where there should be randomness. He persists until he finds a way out of the world of image into the real world, out of the fake light, sky and clouds into the black door of whatever is out there. The tragedy is that the commercial world of television needs us not to find our way out. So the very last image of the Truman Show is not the hero escaping, but the viewers saying, "So, what else is on?"

A marriage of convenience to New York environmental activist Brontë (Andie MacDowell) gets French waiter Georges (Gérard Depardieu) a green card to work in America. Brontë gets a sort of "green card" too, in the form of permission to rent an apartment with a rooftop greenhouse. In fact, the colour green is in almost every scene: an emerald green lamp, a nicely placed green wine bottle in several shots, Brontë's clothes, and of course, plants, which appear in pretty much every interior shot –the apartment, a friend's house, restaurants. The exception is Brontë's bedroom (where she's always alone), which is desert colours. This is a very interior movie, and I love how Weir focuses on little details –feet coming down the stairs, the peephole in the front door, water dripping from leaves in the greenhouse –to make the closed spaces interesting.

The first time we see Georges and Brontë together, they are saying goodbye on the steps of the courthouse after tying the knot. Suspicion from Immigration agents forces the pair to try proving they have a real marriage. They quickly find that they can't stand each other. But the circumstances force them to spend time learning the details of each other's radically different lives, and then repeat them to the Immigration officials in tones of love and admiration, in order to sound like they are mad for each other. Eventually it has an unexpected effect. The point is that acting and speaking like you love someone can actually bring about what it pretends. I think that's true, even though it goes against conventional ideas of being "genuine", which can simply be an excuse for rudeness.

This serious theme is mixed with several situations drawn from the comedy of errors handbook. Green Card has one of the funniest scenes of all time, in my opinion, in which Georges must find a way to convince a room full of New York society people that he's an accomplished musical composer. The laughter is generated by the kind of tension between straight-lacedness and mayhem of a Marx Brothers routine. Bebe Neuwirth as Brontë's friend Lauren is wonderful, nothing remotely like her Lilith character in Cheers, and her reaction to Georges in the musical episode makes the scene even more hilarious.

Phrases like "this movie will drive the Religious Right nuts" get a lot of mileage. A number of reviewers have said it about "Skipped Parts". So I'm wondering what the Religious Right really would think of this film if they examined it seriously.

First, the storyline suggests that sex education for kids is not a good thing and may have unwanted consequences. The women who give the advice, Lydia and Delores, are pretty unsympathetic characters when they're talking to the adolescents. Are we meant to applaud the way they give explicit details (complete with taco shell, like a silly pantomime of a sex ed class) to 14-year-olds, while withholding the key point of where this might lead? I don't think so, because their recklessness is part of a commonplace theme that runs through the film - the kids are more sensible than the adults - and also because we're shown those consequences later. Lydia and Delores might as well give Sam and Maurey a hand grenade and tell them to play carefully. So score a point for Religious Right family values here.

Second, the film doesn't take the view of abortion that the Religious Right might expect from so called "Hollywood liberals". It doesn't present it as a quick and relatively painless way out of a jam, nor does it do any pulpit pounding about the dark days before Roe v Wade. The film could have made Lydia and Delores into proto-feminist heroes, enlightened before their time, but it didn't. In the story, there are two consequences of visiting the abortion clinic and neither one is a guilt free abortion. So score some big points for "family values".

Third, the film ends by affirming the stereotypical woman-man-girl-boy family: the waitress, the Indian, the cheerleader, and the precocious young narrator. Sure, the narrator and the cheerleader have a baby, and the waitress is a grandmother before she's thirty. But unless the Religious Right has recently come out against grandchildren being raised by multi- generational families, I fail to see the problem.

So what's there to offend the RR, other than the portrayal of Wyoming natives as rodeo loving illiterates? (And that's only offensive –probably -if you're from Wyoming.) Well, there's the scene where the two young teens face each other in their underwear, saying something like, "I think this is how it's done." It was uncomfortable and strange. But a lot of reviewers found it creepy, and I'm sure not all are card-carrying members of the 700 Club. And it doesn't change the fundamental themes of the story outlined above.

Lydia's loose morals and rebelliousness are sure to offend the Religious Right, right? Yes, because her actions are *meant* to be offensive: her irresponsible talk, her rambling, self- indulgent rudeness to the welcome lady, her inability to do a stick of work, her cruelty to a man who's much too good for her. The RR is offended and so is everyone else. So maybe, in the movies, actions shouldn't always be judged desirable if they offend conservative Christians. Even the RR is sometimes offended by what's actually offensive.

But I digress. The good news is that, as in all traditional morality tales, Lydia comes round in the end. She gets a job, declares independence (rather than just rebellion) from her father, and settles down with a man who loves her. Sure, she's white and he's Native American, but not even the film's illiterate Wyomians are offended by that.

That leaves just one theme that seems custom made to offend conservative religious types. The film threatens to undermine parental authority and traditional family values by making the kids more sensible and moral than the adults. In fact, the grown ups are mostly first class hypocrites, as revealed especially in the confrontation at the abortion clinic. Sam, on the other hand, is an example of responsibility and kindness. But wait. I think I've read that somewhere before. Something about religious leaders being blind Pharisees and children being the kingdom of heaven. Yes, that definitely sounds like a deliberate attempt to offend the Religious Right.