The trouble with Americans, I sometimes feel, is that they're too easily led.

What, for instance, made them believe that a little sexual impropriety constituted grounds for impeaching the president?

If we in Britain kicked out every politician who'd snogged his secretary, Westminster would be as empty as Filey in February.

Back in 1994, the Yanks convinced themselves that Forrest Gump, an essentially humble fantasy, was somehow an allegory for half a century of social history. The rest of the world was less easily persuaded.

The same syndrome is evident again this weekend with the release of Jim Carrey's new movie, a production that was widely seen in the States as having turned around the conventions of film comedy.

Indeed, The Truman Show, like Forrest Gump before it, is a genuinely original piece of work which resists any of the usual Hollywood pigeonholes. But we in Europe - and especially, perhaps, in Yorkshire - are not likely to be so easily bewitched into believing that different necessarily means better.

"I didn't think much to it at all. Can't see what the fuss is about," said a local cinema staff member after a preview screening in Leeds. That's that, then.

The Truman Show is a particular surprise to fans of Jim Carrey - in which category you may include me - who might have expected another Liar Liar or The Mask.

He is here cast against type as Truman Burbank, an ordinary Joe whose entire life has, without his consent or knowledge, been the subject of television's most successful soap opera.

He has, we learn progressively, been secretly filmed 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the last 30 years; his entire existence having been orchestrated by a TV director and a cast of actors on a giant Hollywood set.

"We've become tired of actors giving us phoney emotions. This is real life," says the sinister, beret-wearing producer Christof (Ed Harris) whose command over the hapless Truman is so complete that he can command like King Canute, "Cue the sea" and have his star capsized by a tidal wave.

It gradually begins to dawn on Truman that he is living a lie: that his friends, his wife even, are merely actors playing parts, and that his only course is to escape, Patrick McGoohan-like.

The problem is that the director, Peter Weir, never begins to address the central, overwhelming implausibility of it all. We really are expected to take at face value the premise that American TV would devote 30 years of continuous airtime to the life of one man, and not one whose life is in any way extraordinary. If it was intended as a satire on the nature of TV, its point is lost.

It's this which fatally compromises The Truman Show - for if we do not believe in the central character, why should we care about him?

In the end, it's Jim Carrey's considerable personal charisma which carries the film. His performance is deeper and more considered than any he has given before, and he demonstrates conclusively that he doesn't need to rely on facial contortions to entertain.

Laura Linney is appealing as his wife Meryl. But like the rest of the supporting cast, her character is necessarily one-dimensional: she is, after all, an actress playing an actress.

Hollywood has been deeply influenced by the success of The Truman Show (in its first three weeks it took 100 million dollars at the US box office). Ron Howard, director of Apollo 13, is now working on Ed TV, a film about a video store clerk whose life becomes the subject of a TV documentary; and Gary Ross's Pleasantville is a comedy about a brother and sister who become stuck in a 1950s sitcom.

Euro-cynics such as we may, then, be voices in the wilderness as Hollywood leaps upon yet another bandwagon. The difference, it seems, between satire and superficiality depends upon which side of the Atlantic you stand.

David Behrens

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