Movie Monday: The Truman Show

Going to try something out called Movie Monday where I pick some movies that I like and try to recommend them to the best of my ability. I want to do 3 movies a week because there's no way I'm going to do this long enough to justify only one movie a week, but these take a lot more energy to make than I thought. So I'll just have the rules fluctuate.

The first movie I'm doing is The Truman Show.

I recently picked up the 4K UHD of the film because it's my favorite movie of all time and I wanted to finally own a copy that wasn't on VHS. Every time I watch this movie, there's something brand new I pick up on. It's such a dense film with so much going on. And YET, it's a film that completely satisfies me. The Truman Show creates an artificial world and in less than 2 hours manages to fully explore it. It gives you just enough information to allow you to fill in the blanks yourself. The production design and direction is masterful.

I rewatched half of the movie while writing this blog post, and the character I want to focus on is Hannah Gill, or "Meryl", played by Laura Linney. Everything in Truman's world is intentionally artificial, including his love. Hannah Gill is the actress that was chosen to be Truman's loving wife, you could consider it an arranged marriage of sorts. Everything she does is for the sake of that. But he doesn't love her and she doesn't love him. The girl that Truman fell in love with is a background actor who was removed for giving too much information away, and Truman has been trying to look for her all this time. But Meryl is there to try and bring control to Truman's actions. She loves the show more than she loves him.

I could endlessly write about this show, but for the sake of brevity, I'm going to move on. An absolutely phenomenal movie. Truly unlike anything you'll ever see. I can't recommend it enough.