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A pleasant enough mess >> Pop culture and real life merge once more in Pleasantville by MATTHEW HAYS
Such is the scenario in Pleasantville, as two teenagers (Tobey Maguire as the nerd and Reese Witherspoon as his cool, promiscuous sister) find themselves transported mysteriously into Pleasantville. No ordinary town, this: it's actually the setting for the long-running family-values series Pleasantville, the reruns of which Maguire is hooked on. Though puzzled by their predicament, Maguire recognizes that the two have their chance to escape, but must play by Pleasantville's code of conduct: no sex, no imaginary, individual thinking, just stick to the rules and the various plotlines. Witherspoon has ideas of her own, however, choosing to corrupt the leader of the local basketball team at the town's lover's lane. As the plot progresses, the two subversives soon find that their ideas from the real world are infecting the sweet, innocent Pleasantville townsfolk. One by one, people convert to colour, while those left behind remain in black and white. The gags are a bit tired as the film establishes its premise. Yep, people acted a whole lot different in the '50s: divorces were rare, everyone appeared to trust each other much, much more and the reflection of everyday life on TV was whitewashed to the extreme. Throw a couple of '90s-era kids into the mix and things are bound to get oh-so-wacky. The film soon risks relying a bit too heavily on its special-effects team; like What Dreams May Come, much of the thrill of watching the film derives from visual tricks (colour people interacting with those who are still in black and white, etc.) To his credit, director-screenwriter Gary Ross, who also penned the screenplays for Big and Dave, does take some risks here. Rather than vapidly glorifying the '50s era, he evokes the memories of racial segregation and McCarthyism as two of the period's primary evils ("NO COLOURED ALLOWED" signs soon adorn many of the shop windows that remain in black and white). In an astute bit of casting, J.T. Walsh plays the mayor of Pleasantville, who is soon plotting a backlash against those who've dared to change. By clearly favouring the colourized townsfolk, Ross is giving his tacit approval to all sorts of behaviour, from masturbation to infidelity. This may not sound terribly radical, and Ross is indeed hiding behind the façade of sci-fi fantasy, but in a country where Dan Quayle can still command an audience (witness last Sunday's Face the Nation), Ross should be commended for suggesting--however subtly--that the traditional nuclear family unit just might not be the divine ideal. What is hammered home--in true '90s-style, Hollywood-studio, all-American fashion--is the film's theme. Despite all the problems and challenges faced within a more complex, diverse society, that full spectrum of experience is more worthwhile than living life in, like, simple black and white. Unfortunately, Ross chooses to double-dip his conclusion in such ludicrous sentiment that, by film's end, it's difficult to peel oneself off the sticky chair and exit the cinema. For all its posturing as an indictment of retro TV culture, Pleasantville closes with the treacly finesse of an old episode of Leave It to Beaver. Pleasantville opens Friday, October 23
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In the era of movies based on The Brady Bunch, The Avengers and Leave It to Beaver, in a TV season rife with resurrections of Fantasy Island, Donny and Marie and Hollywood Squares, a film in which the screenwriter actually creates his own fictional '50s TV series might appear downright original.