Pleasantville Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)October 21st, 1998
PLEASANTVILLE
(New Line)
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Jeff Daniels, J. T. Walsh, Don Knotts.
Screenplay: Gary Ross.
Producers: Gary Ross, Jon Kilik, Robert J. Degus and Steven Soderbergh. Director: Gary Ross.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexual situations, adult themes, profanity) Running Time: 122 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In PLEASANTVILLE U.S.A., it's always 72 degrees and sunny. Every house has a white picket fence, and a mom at home who has dinner on the table at 6:00 sharp. The hometown high school basketball team has never lost a game -- in fact, it has never missed a basket. Teenage lovebirds never go any farther than holding hands, and only then after they've been "pinned." The world and its values are completely black-and-white -- particularly white in the case of the population demographics. In PLEASANTVILLE everything is always perfect, it's always 1958, and nothing ever changes.
The one minor problem with Pleasantville is that it doesn't exist, nor has it ever existed. It's the world of an innocuous 1950s family sit-com, played in perpetual reruns on a cable nostalgia network. That doesn't prevent it from being extremely attractive to David (Tobey Maguire), a high school senior living in a single-parent home and a 1990s world of AIDS, economic uncertainty and warnings of impending environmental collapse. For David, Pleasantville is an escape, but he never expects to be physically transported, along with his wild-child twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), into the world of the sit-com itself. There they take on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue, the wholesome offspring of wholesome parents George (William H. Macy) and Betty (Joan Allen) in a wholesome town where the road comes right back to where you started.
It's a great high-concept premise which could have worked strictly as a fish-out-of-water comedy. Jennifer is overwhelmed by the massive breakfast prepared by Betty, complete with ham steak and drenched in syrup; the basketball team captain responds with blank stares to Jennifer's sexual advances; the local fire department exists solely to rescue cats from trees. While Jennifer does her best to turn Pleasantville upside-down with her contemporary ways, David does his best to minimize the damage and preserve the simple world he has come to love. Screenwriter Gary Ross (BIG, DAVE) continues to show a flair for high concepts with a human touch in his directorial debut, generating laughs from the clash of Eisenhower-era and Clinton-era mores, as well as from characters awakening to the fact that seeking fulfillment may mean an end to their static bliss.
But PLEASANTVILLE isn't merely a whimsical lark. As he exposes his characters to experiences they'd never even considered, Ross turns the film into a pointed examination of what we really mean when we talk about "traditional family values." The sudden emergence of teenage rebellion and nascent feminism send townspeople into a panicked search for any way to ensure stability, driven by Pleasantville mayor Big Bob (the late J. T. Walsh, playing a marvelous amalgam of conservative platitude-spitters). PLEASANTVILLE digs into the barely-concealed anxiety and xenophobia at the heart of so much political retro-think, yet that's not even the film's most daring idea. Ross has the guts to take on the notion of original sin itself, suggesting that the very passion and curiosity which lead to upheaval in paradise are also what make us most alive and most human, giving color to an otherwise monochromatic existence.
It's unfortunate that Ross gets a bit too self-congratulatory about his social satire, particularly in the final half-hour. As tensions build in Pleasantville, the battle becomes a clash between those characters still in black-and-white and those whose new, life-changing experiences have left them "colored" -- and that may be the _least_ consistently underlined point. Ross starts repeating himself, weighing down the previously light tone and drifting away from solid dramatic anchors like Joan Allen's housewife on a journey of self-discovery. PLEASANTVILLE is a funny and thoughtful film, the kind that works best before it starts tattooing The Moral of the Story across your backbrain. It's plenty entertaining just watching the mythology of the "good old days" laid bare, exposed as a comforting fiction far removed from a world where coping with change is more productive than demonizing it.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 shades of grey: 7.
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