# Pleasantville (1998)

### reviewed by
Curtis Edmonds

by Curtis D. Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?

Calvin's Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It's just that the world was black and white then.

    Calvin:  Really?

Calvin's Dad: Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930's and it was pretty grainy color there for a while.

Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color? If the world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?

Calvin's Dad: Not necesarily. A lot of great artists were insane.

Calvin: But... but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?

Calvin's Dad: Of course. But they turned colors like everything else did in the 30's.

-- Bill Watterson, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink", A Calvin & Hobbes Collection

There are only two good things about Pleasantville. One is that it made me get my Calvin and Hobbes books out of the closet to find that quote. The other is the seamless integration of color and black-and-white images as the small TV town of Pleasantville metamorphizes into a colored world. Other than that, there's not much to recommend this awkward puzzler of a movie about a town that struggles as its population and landscape starts to take on new hues.

We've seen this technique before, most notably in Schindler's List, where Steven Spielberg chose to color his black-and-white vision of the Holocaust by showing us the color of a doomed girl's red dress and the bright flame of candles. But Schindler's List had a great story to tell -- the color was just a device to accent two moving and poignant scenes. In Pleasantville, the color changes aren't accents, they're the whole story -- and it's not a story that's emotionally compelling in any way. (Although the line between Pleasantvillians and the Nazis turns out to be very narrow.)

Pleasantville draws from two main sources of inspiration: time travel and alternate reality. In this instance, two modern quarreling teenagers (Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) are thrust into the alternate universe of a 1950's television sitcom. While this seems like an original concept (or it must have seemed like an original concept to the studio bosses who greenlighted it), both strands of this genre have been done before, with better results. Back to the Future, a less ambitious but more entertaining movie, effectively showed the culture shock of a modern teenager coping with a world without MTV. Peggy Sue Got Married does an even better job of cultural juxtaposition.

Pleasantville is able to manage only a few pokes at satire in a setting that's ripe for it -- even the wretched-beyond-words Last Action Hero and the listless Truman Show managed to skewer their respective targets somewhat effectively. The only cleverness exhibited by the script is in its references to the segregation rampant in the 50's: the people who have transformed from black-and-white to Technicolor are branded as "coloreds" and forced to sit in the balcony of the courthouse.

The problems of Pleasantville have nothing to do with the cast. Maguire is given the lead, and he's effective and touching as the leader of the "coloreds". He starts out as an uber-geek, a fanatical devotee of the Pleasantville reruns on a "Nick at Nite" knockoff. When he wrestles with his sister for the remote control on the night of the Pleasantville marathon, he shouts that he's been waiting a year for this -- and we believe him, and that's very very sad. Somehow, he matures emotionally during his stay in Pleasantville, and it's a treat to see his character transform into a compassionate and sensitive adult. But his character is a mass of paradoxes. Thrust into his ideal fantasy world, he screams to be let out, presumably to watch the show some more. He watches the show ostensibly to bask in the parental love missing in his dysfunctional family, but we never see him spending much quality time with his parents. He wants to preserve the town of Pleasantville, but ends up altering it forever. We're never sure what Maguire is thinking, or why he acts the way he does -- a trait, unfortunately, he shares with his fellow townsfolk.

Witherspoon sparks the sexual revolution in Pleasantville and then all but disappears. She looks outstanding in black and white, and she makes angora sweaters look better than anyone this side of Johnny Depp in Ed Wood. But she's given very little to do in the second half of the movie, and the movie is poorer for it.

The Pleasantville parents are absolutely dead-on in their portrayal. Veterans William Macy and Joan Allen look like they were born to play their roles of Mom and Dad. I would have loved to have seen Macy get a little bit crazy with the whole family-man thing, the way he did in Fargo, but instead he settles into befuddlement. Allen is the spouse who gets to rebel, but her transformation from prim housewife to town scandal happens so sharply that it's scarcely credible. Of the other grownups, Jeff Daniels is wasted as a soda jerk with an odd learning-disability who learns to paint overnight, while the late great J.T. Walsh glowers effectively in his last performance. (Don Knotts makes the least sense of anyone in the whole movie as the TV repairman who sends Maguire and Witherspoon on their journey: if he's a comic genius, then I'm Pauline Kael.)

Pleasantville reminds me of a film that seems to be its polar opposite: Alex Proyas's brooding nightmare Dark City. Both films are well-cast, with outstanding set designs and cinematography emanating from an overarching vision. But neither of them has a plot to speak of. They both lie up there on the screen like well-dressed corpses, waiting for a spark to animate them. Dark City is marginally worse, I suppose, because it's largely humorless, but it's a close call.

I did like one scene in Pleasantville, where the high school kids stand in line waiting to go to the library, whose books have miraculously sprouted words. Kudos to Pleasantville for encouraging reading. And that's the message of this review as well: Don't watch Pleasantville, read a book instead. (And no, sorry, Calvin and Hobbes books don't count.)

    Rating:  C

    --

    --
    Curtis Edmonds
    blueduck@hsbr.org

Movie Reviews: http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Curtis+Edmonds

Hollywood Stock Exchange: http://www.hsbr.org/brokers/blueduck/

"Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin."

       -- P.J. O'Rourke

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews