Film - Real life as TV drama? Jonathan Romney's seen it all before
There's an infallible way to tell if a media phenomenon has come of age - it's when you see it satirised on film and you realise that the film-makers are about a decade out of step with the world. In Ron Howard's EDtv, video store clerk Ed (Matthew McConaughey) wakes up to find his bed surrounded by a TV crew recording his every move. If the film were remotely on the ball, they'd be buzzing round him like fireflies with an arsenal of hand-held camcorders. Instead, they tote huge shoulder-held machines, with a boom mike bobbing obtrusively in everyone's face.
EDtv is the worst case of bad timing in recent Hollywood history. Its premise - a man's everyday life becomes a non-stop real-time TV soap - is a pretty good idea, or was a few years ago, when some Canadian film-makers first thought of it (they are duly acknowledged in EDtv's credits). But an even better idea was had by the makers of The Truman Show, which pipped Howard's film to release by several months, and which spun the verite premise into a paranoid fantasy about an innocent whose entire life turns out to be a lavishly constructed production.
EDtv takes a strictly realist tack - its idea is that there's reality and then there's TV and never the twain should mix. But the genre of real-life docu-soap is all too familiar: it long ago became the British disease, and we're more than used to the sight of ostentatiously "ordinary" people, airline workers or cruise-line crooners, becoming larger-than-life quasi-celebrities. In fact EDtv acknowledges that its idea is not entirely new. There's a reference to the American 1970s documentary series that was a precursor to the BBC's own ground-breaking The Family: the first time that audiences realised how much a fly on the wall could affect what went on within the walls. Yet it seems to think that nothing has happened since. What supposedly makes the Ed show different is that it will be unedited, uncut and screened 24 hours a day.
Ambitious but well-meaning exec Ellen DeGeneres finds a likely subject in Ed, an easy-going, unambitious guy whom the camera simply loves. And the film's revelation, and complaint, is that if the camera doesn't love you, you're screwed. Ed's girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman) proves too real - not "hot" enough - for the public, which takes an implausibly extreme dislike to her. They root for a rival in the shape of "model and sort of actress" Jill (Elizabeth Hurley), who has the network's backing. The film is halfway to making a smart comment by casting Hurley, who has made a career out of being perceived as a hollow, camera-hungry dilettante. But, once again, the film is trumped by reality: the crowd that gathers for Jill and Ed's tryst isn't that much odder than the brouhaha around the supposed liaison of Chris Evans and Geri Halliwell (two people whose ordinariness parleyed into celebrity beats anything here).
Besides, the use of Hurley as an in-joke is diluted by the hackneyed use of real personalities to provide tut-tutting commentary and to show how everyone has become obsessed with Ed, from chat-show farceurs like Jay Leno to supposed heavyweights such as the loudmouth provocateur Michael Moore, who pleads, "Let's get back to the way TV used to be". Used to be? Presumably, as in the time of the feeble sitcom Happy Days, on which Ron Howard was a teenage star (and judging by EDtv, how he must have loathed his audience).
Too bad if EDtv is outdated, but I doubt it would have been any better had it acknowledged that unedited verite portraits actually screen all the time on the Internet, with subjects taking responsibility for presenting their own lives. The film is too committed to the dichotomy of real people versus parasitic media, and is unwilling to tackle the confident ways in which private individuals are now beginning to use media attention (how come Ed never thinks of getting his own Max Clifford?). EDtv belongs to a long trend of Hollywood cinema - bankrolled by the same companies that own the TV networks - sneering at TV viewers' passivity, while pretending that people who pay £7 to go out and watch trash are somehow smarter than those who watch trash, or turn it off, in the comfort of their own homes. EDtv is joylessly sniffy about people who watch TV and people who make it, but still has the nerve to call in TV pundits such as George Plimpton as moral arbiters. Profoundly condescending in its attitude to its characters, especially to Ed's squabbling, KFC-guzzling family, the film makes it clear that blue-collar types just aren't smart or tough enough to withstand the debilitating glare of the cameras. Ultimately, though, they are obliged to play TV's game if they're to escape it - the drama demands that Ed and Shari finally triumph by kissing on screen.
If they really wanted to know about the fluid, complex intersections of individual lives and television exposure, Howard and his screenwriters, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, would have done well to brush up on Paddington Green or The Real Holiday Show or Blind Date. Or if they wanted a glimpse of how scathing media satire can be, they could have stayed at home and checked out re-runs of Larry Sanders. What's wrong with these people - don't they ever watch television?
"EDtv" (12) is on general release
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