Just who's fooling who?

EdTV (12)

IN popular terms, of course, EdTV arrives too late. A spry serio- comedy on America's fascination with telly culture? The Truman Show got there first, and Pleasantville got there next. Pull EdTV past the finish line, stick a bronze medal on its chest and consign it to the dustbin of history.

Except it's not that simple. In reality, Ron Howard's airy satire takes its lead from an obscure French-Canadian film, Louis XIX: Roi Des Ondes. Where The Truman Show was cool and weighty and intellectual, EdTV is slapdash and genial. And where Jim Carrey's Truman was an unwitting star, Matthew McConnaughey's Ed knows precisely what's going on. A slobbish video-store clerk, he is plucked out of obscurity by Ellen DeGeneres' cable-channel producer and made the central subject of a ratings-boosting 24-hour "reality show".

So Ed wakes up and plods about and goes to bed with a camera stuck in his face. He scratches his nuts, guzzles beer from the can and laboriously clips his toe-nails - and all the while couch-potato USA just sits there watching. His best mate John (Adam Goldberg) cuts to the nub of the situation. "It used to be that people were famous for being special," he muses. "Now they're just special for being famous."

The trouble is that - wouldn't you know it? - Ed's fame soon starts to impact on his ordinary Joe existence. For a start, he takes up with Shari (Jenna Elfman), the girlfriend of his scuzzball brother Ray (Woody Harrelson), and an audience survey finds that 71% of viewers are opposed to the match. The producers then proceed to pair him up with an ambitious British starlet (Liz Hurley, natch). Cuckolded Ray bags a big advance to write a tell-all tome called My Brother Pissed On Me. Ed's long-lost dad (Dennis Hopper) crawls abruptly out of the woodwork. Originally conceived as an unabridged, warts 'n' all docu-soap, our hero's telly life begins to look more like a puppet show, with Ed in the role of chief marionette.

There is a telling scene in Annie Hall in which Woody Allen visits a friend and former colleague who has sold out, moved to LA and taken a job in television. As a horrified Allen observes a laughter track being added to his friend's on-screen antics, the implication is clear. TV, it transpires, is just not as elegant, honest or artistic as film. It's cinema's idiot cousin - a symbol for all that's dumb in American popular culture.

The current crop of TV-themed movies pays lip-service to the same smug prejudice. In The Truman Show, television served as a metaphor for the alienation and identity crisis of the modern American man. Pleasantville had it propagating a bogus landscape that crumbled when introduced to the real world.

In EdTV, the small-screen is shown to warp and corrode everyday lives, magnify flaws, stir up old resentments and convert the ebb and flow of existence into bite-sized "drama".

Fair enough, I suppose. But is film - and, in particular, this film - so very different? Midway through, EdTV's mickey-take of telly culture gives way to a cosy little Aesop's fable as its subject decides to extricate himself from fame and become plain old Ed Pekurny again.

Similarly, while the film frowns on the TV audience's callous repudiation of dowdy Shari, its trailers and promo posters appear just as enamoured of the photogenic Liz Hurley (whose part amounts to little more than a cameo) as EdTV's shallow public and ratings- hungry producers are. Hypocrisy, thy name is Hollywood.

This is not to write EdTV off completely. All told, it's a snappily assembled, breezily amusing little exercise. McConnaughey excels as its affable everyman, Harrelson as his more unstable sibling, while Martin Landau contributes another effortlessly assured support turn as Ed's salty, wheelchair-riding stepdad. It's just that this lightly cynical picture is finally not quite as rigorous as it thinks it is. It is too much of a grab-bag of tones and intentions to hang together the way that it should.

EdTV channel-surfs between biting satire, homespun drama and romantic comedy without ever fixing on a channel it is happy with. Its scattergun diet provides nibbles rather than a square and hearty meal.

It's a film about TV culture that comes out of TV culture. Mutually wary, the two media are actually much closer than they think.

Xan Brooks

Copyright 1999
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