For its central dramatic (and, purportedly, its philosophical) conflict, 30-year-old Truman begins to rebel as he pieces together the nearly incomprehensible reality of a life which has been lived in a huge, domed set resembling a picture-perfect small town and in which all of the picture-perfect citizens, including his wife and family and everyone he’s ever known, are actors. Unsatisfied with this safe but controlled existence, he decides to overcome his fear of the unknown and break out. Although The Truman Show is likely to be a huge commercial success, some viewers may come away without the final, cathartic sense of release the film’s protagonist achieves. For, ultimately, the film plays it safe; it never launches itself from its clever premise. It seems almost hermetically smug in its assurance that it has a couple of brilliant ideas and a few remarkable images.

Peter Weir, a seductively imaginative director, provides some compensatory resonance for Niccol’s script, but cannot rescue it, in the end, from the cerebral anemia that keeps it from being as thought-provoking as one wants it to be. Like the artificial life in Truman’s hometown of Seahaven, the risk-taking of this film is, ironically and annoyingly, stifled; just as Truman has been programmed not to trust himself in the outside world, so we, the audience for The Truman Show, have not been trusted enough by its makers to want to think further. In much of its pre-release marketing ballyhoo and in numerous interviews, the writer and director have touted the fact that they are proud of having managed to wrangle out of Hollywood “the first big-budget ‘art’ film.” What they seem to have wrangled is a product that cheats both halves of its promised hybrid persona. The tone of the film is wildly uneven and the pace, at times, deadly. One can appreciate the goal and the effort – and enjoy much of this film – without being inspired to join lemming-like queues buying Truman dolls or the cocktail party psycho-babble comparing the film with Sartre or Kierkegaard. (A far stronger argument might be made for the integrity of vision and the imaginative realization of the hero’s quest theme in Tim Burton’s superb Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.)

Noah Emmerich and Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.

The usefulness of The Truman Show in discussions of media and culture is that it affords a painless point of departure. However much Jim Carrey may be banking on this film to expand his castability for dramatic roles, everyone going to see The Truman Show can guess they’re unlikely to be brought to their knees in tears. They’re correct: the kinetically clownish Carrey comports himself well enough here, but neither he nor the script has enough edge really to drive the hard issues home, to nettle us with questions about how we respond to, and are defined by, the visual media. The film’s air of cartoonishness, of fantasy, is heightened by our already-established perception of Carrey’s persona, and we’re offered little reason to alter it. He uses just enough of his standard repertoire of funny faces and bits to sabotage his leap to acceptance as a serious actor. When, in a scene or two, he expresses angst or even cries a bit, it merely seems one more Carreyesque “look-at-this!” stunt, no more genuinely felt than the “acted” emotions of the people around him. The fundamental tension of the film – that Truman discovers the truth of his life and wants to step outside the frame of the camera’s control – is not reinforced by the casting of such a shamelessly (by his own admission) camera-hungry star. Additionally, the film was shot in the tidily upscale, “architecturally homogeneous,” community of Seaside on the Florida Gulf. Both actor and ambience keep the film, and us, from getting – depending on your point of view – either too serious or serious enough. (The attempt at eerie big-brotherliness here doesn’t hold a candle to that ’50s paranoia classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

Even if it is substantially a what-might-have-been proposition, The Truman Show may be one more popular encouragement to continue our conversation about the radically shifting lines between art and life, medium and message, ordering influence and random reality, reportage and passivity, human consciousness and virtual existence.

The final scene is brilliant – almost teleological – and memorable, far more effective thematically than much of the wan, sophomoric philosophizing for which most of the film settles. It is the occasional moment like this that makes one realize that The Truman Show is afflicted with the very outrage that plagues its hero – it’s trapped by an exhilarating concept that atrophies through underdevelopment; it doesn’t let our minds or our souls breathe. Like the small, circumscribed, calculated, regimen of Seahaven – The Truman Show is just good enough to make you angry that it isn’t a lot better.