Reviews

I started this series because I like historical dramas, I think it's fun when real people from a given period are dropped in amongst mostly fictional characters, and I don't mind violence. Season 1 was very promising. Season 2 started to fall off about halfway through. By the start of Season 3 I knew I didn't have it in me to go three more rounds with this thing.

First of all, by then I was lost… I couldn't keep track of who had done what to whom and why. That's not necessarily the show's fault; if I can't keep up, maybe I'm just not that bright. But also, the characterizations of some of the main personalities seemed to become wildly inconsistent: Agent Van Alden, likely one of the more interesting yet repulsive characters, evolves from a troubled and overly-focused fundamentalist to a guy who thinks drowning his partner at a baptism in front of dozens of witnesses is the logical way to cope with a perceived problem, and that keeping a pregnant woman prisoner until she pops out the baby he wants to gift his barren wife with is also a perfectly workable solution to a sticky situation. That's my prime example, but there were others. On top of that, the show seemed to think it needed to constantly one-up itself, so that each episode was a bit more of a reach plot-wise, shock-value-wise and violence-wise than the one before it had been. A story stopped being a story, and started to become a series of eye-catching events. Some people like that, but it wasn't enough for me.

I ended up bailing shortly after the start of Season 3. I did read all the episode summaries because there were a couple of things I really did want to know (like what happened to the fascinating Richard). I picked out a couple of later episodes to watch, including the series finale, but there was no way I was going to take the time to watch every single one all the way to the end. Good concept, good cast for the most part, just didn't have the staying power for me.

I really wanted to like this, and I expected to. I like Cary Grant. I like lots of comedies of the same period. What happened? Unfortunately, the George and Marion characters don't come off as likable. They seem painfully self-involved and completely unconcerned about anyone else except themselves. They drive to endanger (not funny), they drive drunk (not funny), they make it a game to inconvenience someone who appears to be a friend of theirs who owns a tavern and wants to go home when it's well past closing (who can blame him?), they hand a police officer an empty milk bottle when they're parked where they shouldn't be and tell him to dispose of it… sorry, but I don't like people who act like that. I don't find it charming. I thought one of the biggest pains in the butt in cinema history was the supposedly quirky Holly Golightly in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", and George and Marion give me just about the same vibe. Nothing about them appeals to me.

Their "good deed" in getting Topper to let his hair down only succeeds in embarrassment and consternation for the poor guy, for the most part. It seems to end "well", I suppose, but it's awkward and uncomfortable to watch. Apparently it was a hit in its day, so I can't argue with that, but personally I didn't care for it at all.

For quite a while I refused to watch this based on who the star was. I was familiar with his "style" and didn't care for it. I finally gave in to all the assurances that this film wasn't like his other performances, and I really liked it.

The reviewers who say it's like an episode of "The Twilight Zone" aren't far off. But I like the fact that it's not taken too seriously, unlike many TZ episodes... this subject matter, as evidenced by many of the "hated it" reviews, could easily have been presented and intended to be taken in a deadly-serious way, but it's not, and I like that.

There could easily have been a "show-down" scene at the end between a disappointed, unbalanced, angry Truman and his "creator", Christoph. I usually don't like open-ended conclusions, but in this case I thought it worked. Truman remains the nice, trusting guy he always was... he sees his newfound freedom as a gift, a long-awaited chance to see what the actual world has to offer, and he takes it, with no visible hard feelings. Why not? That's his character and his nature. A confrontation scene would have been interesting and most likely well-played by both Carrey and Harris, but it wasn't necessary. The payoff for the audience is that Christoph loses everything in the blink of an eye (fame, power, income, and the biggie: complete control), while Truman goes off to begin his REAL life (and presumably track down his lost love somewhere along the way).

It's especially interesting to view this today, with the reality-TV wave cresting. The real people on these current shows are called "cast members", their lives are called "storylines" which are played out in "seasons", and sometimes it can be hard to remember that they're actual human beings.

"The Truman Show" started, by Christoph's own admission, with an unwanted pregnancy. So did "Teen Mom".

We thought this was hilarious when it was run endlessly on HBO in the early 1980's, and we quoted it all the time: "Does your deug baht?" "Do you have a reum?". I was looking forward to seeing it again recently, but thought it fell rather flat when I finally did. It has its moments, and Herbert Lom is entertaining as "the lunatic Dreyfus", but it's not the gem I remember. (How's this for a line I bet they wish they could take back in a screwball comedy: on the topic of the disintegration of the UN, Dreyfus screams, "I want a crater! Wreckage! Twisted metal! Something the world will never forget!" In another couple decades the Twin Towers would fill that request for real.) The end picks up a little bit after a sagging middle (I thought that bedroom ambush between Clouseau and Cato would never end), so it's worth hanging on to get to the finale which has some clever stuff in it. Not as good as I remember it, though.