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.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download