: (Burkhart Dallwitz/Philip Glass)
There's so much to love and loath about the 1998 drama
by Peter Weir, and for those studying the impact of mass media
on society, it opens countless doors to lengthy debate. Among its
greatest assets is its incredible originality, a trait pushed heavily by
Paramount at the time of the film's release amidst summer blockbusters
of the normal action variety. It's a thinking man's film, postulating
about the impact of the fictional, longest-running television show in
history on its star. The catch is that the star doesn't realize that he
is the subject of the show, filmed by thousands of hidden cameras and
surrounded by actors for his entire life. His struggle to realize his
identity and eventually escape from the massive town-sized bubble that
serves as the studio set is the literal plotline, though issues of God
relations and media manipulation are unfortunately left wanting in the
production's unexpectedly short running time. Therein lie the
catastrophic problems with
. While the exploration
of all the facets of the production is fascinating to both view and
contemplate, the film is perhaps the most disturbing tale of abuse ever
conceived. The plot seems to ignore the facts that the civil rights of
Jim Carrey's title character are unequivocally violated and the cost of
such a production at startup would never be acceptable to any studio.
And what about this man's sex life? Can't a guy masturbate in the living
room without a studio producer waiting for him to finish? These
overwhelming fallacies of logic are devastating counterweights to the
originality of the tale and some of the minimal humor conveyed in its
early scenes (the "It Could Happen to You" poster of an airplane impaled
by lightning in the travel agency office is nothing less than classic
and should have been marketed as one of the film's alternate posters).
Nevertheless, the film was an enormous success and finally allowed
Carrey to leave his rubbery slapstick mannerisms aside. One of the most
interesting conundrums created by Weir is the role of music in
. It exists on two levels, one meant to address the
broadcast of the show and thus aimed at its fictional viewers within the
tale, and a second meant to actually score the overarching film
itself.
An extremely intelligent dual-employment of music in
The Truman Show was seemingly the intent of Weir, but as he has a
tendency to do, he loses track of a score's overall consistency in the
process of searching for the right piece of music for each individual
scene. This has been a habit that has ruined the flow of the music in
many of his films, 2003's
Master and Commander another prime
example. Not surprisingly, the music ultimately employed for
The
Truman Show suffers from the exact same functional dilemma as the
film's concept. The soundtrack has so much going for it, sometimes
reaching the boundaries of brilliance, and yet it misses so many
opportunities to form a truly powerful whole. It is purely the result of
a Weir methodology that takes a day's shoot and then mixes over it all
sorts of existing music to hear what kind of approach might work.
Inevitably, some of that music ends up staying in the picture and thus
limits any chances of a cohesive overall soundtrack from existing. In
the case of
The Truman Show, Weir decided to settle upon the
music of Philip Glass to represent the real life side of the film's
story, utilizing several (questionable) pieces from Glass' scores of the
1980's and 1990's alongside a few original recordings by the composer.
Why not hire Glass to write another ten minutes of original music
instead for continuity purposes? Alternately, to address the music
intended to be heard as part of the show within the film, Weir went with
little-known Australian composer Burkhart Dallwitz. The differences
between the two composers' styles is easily distinguishable; despite the
fact that Dallwitz also uses a piano extensively as the central
personality of his cues, there isn't much of an effort made to clearly
plan the direction of the two styles outside of a stream of
consciousness mode of addressing each scene by Weir. Seeing the show's
orchestra actually perform in the heartbreakingly beautiful "Reunion"
scene is the kind of teasing that could have been explored better in the
film, establishing Dallwitz's material as representing the show's. But
if Glass' music was meant to represent Ed Harris' God-like producer and
the larger concept as a whole, which makes sense given the more cerebral
and procedural aspects of his writing (the almost mechanical rhythms are
appropriate here), then Weir allows too much bleeding of the lines to
make that distinction work.
The Glass and Dallwitz material is never assigned
cleanly enough to the two roles of music in the film to realize the
potential that this soundtrack obviously had. For those not interested
in pondering such intellectual issues, there is still some gorgeous
music to be heard in
The Truman Show. The Dallwitz material has a
contemporary feel in its keyboarding and electronic embellishments
(something that doesn't really match the retro art direction of the
show, which is another continuity problem with the soundtrack),
soothingly pretty from the Enya imitation "It's a Life" to "Truman Sets
Sail." The aforementioned "Reunion" overcomes its basic structures to
stun with redemptive harmony and a well-mixed piano over a string
ensemble. Two individual standout cues by Dallwitz include the edgy
percussion, keyboarding, and electric guitars of "Drive" and the
intriguingly optimistic chopping of "A New Life," an unused cue with
wicked violin solos at its conclusion. The remainder of Dallwitz's
contribution is underwhelming at best, inaudibly droning at worst. The
opening "Trutalk" cue is inhibited on the soundtrack album by the
introductory dialogue describing the show in the film. The Glass music
has to be divided into two halves: his existing material, which is
synthetically obnoxious in most of its applications, and his original
work for this film, which is far lovelier in the later, more
intoxicating Glass sense. The trio of "Dreaming of Fiji," "Truman
Sleeps," and "Raising the Sail" offers some much needed consistency in
the thematic department, these three cues offering really the only truly
cohesive melodic identity for the lead character and his aspirations.
How does all of this fit together? That's the problemÉ It doesn't. It's
amazing how the concept of two composers for two scores for the same
film, as well as a handful of clearly effective cues amounting to five
to ten minutes of great music from each composer, can be so thoroughly
wasted by Weir's poor direction of those elements in the finished
product. As previously stated, some listeners won't care. They may even
enjoy the Wojciech Kilar and Frederic Chopin pieces inserted into the
mix. The album sold incredibly well for an entire decade because of such
appeal. But at the end of the day, it's hard not to be disappointed by
the feeling that the score (or two scores) for
The Truman Show
were a tremendously missed opportunity for intellectual depth of the
kind never heard in a film's soundtrack before.
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