The premise, solidly science-fictional, is of a man whose entire life has been a twenty-four-hour-a-day cable TV show and who doesn't know it. His imprisoningly finite universe is an enormous, enclosed biospheric sound stage constructed next to the hillside "Hollywood" sign and dotted with 5,000 hidden cameras. Its residents, aside from the unaware star of the show, are paid actors and extras. (The commercial-free program depends on product placement for revenue: "I've tasted other cocoas," chirps the dementedly upbeat wife, a refugee from 1950s advertisements: "This is the best!") Recent glitches in the operation have begun to prod the protagonist to the brink of an awakening: a light fixture falls out of the "sky," the car radio picks up errant instructions from the director -- or, more grandiosely, "televisionary" -- intended for the cast and crew, and most alarmingly, the protagonist's "father," a disgruntled out-of-work actor, crashes the set without warning, necessitating some hasty soap-opera-style revising of the script to deal with his sudden reappearance twenty-two years after his "death." The father-son reunion is glossed over in such a way -- where are those 5,000 cameras when we want one? -- as to point up glitches in the movie itself: the more we learn, the more we don't know. Less might have been preferable. Shorter, quicker, sketchier, abstracter. (The Nielsen ratings, not to mention routine bodily functions, hardly bear thinking about: it's one thing to watch a man settle down in front of his television set after a long day's work; it would be quite another to watch him watching it for the remainder of the evening.) The premise, as laid out, seems just about right for an old half-hour episode of Twilight Zone or for a few pages in an old edition of Astounding Science Fiction. Jim Carrey, in recognition of the underlying seriousness of the enterprise, has cut out some, but not all, of his manic Carreyisms. The problem with that is that once these have been removed, there is nothing much left in their place. With Laura Linney, Ed Harris, Natascha McElhone, Harry Shearer; written by Andrew Niccol; directed by Peter Weir. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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