...the film does a good job chronicling their slow and sometimes painful transformation from one-dimensional cutouts to fully realized, open-minded human beings.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
The movie year 1998 saw Jim Carrey trapped inside a make-believe television world in "The Truman Show" and then Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon trapped inside a similar cosmos in "Pleasantville." Although "Pleasantville" wears its messages rather more openly than "Truman," both fantasies are ingenious fables for our times, good fun, and thought provoking. If you liked "The Truman Show," you are sure to like "Pleasantville," maybe even more.
So, like Maguire and Witherspoon play these two everyday, modern teenagers, you know, named David and Jennifer. I mean, like, they´re really cool, you know? Well, Jennifer is, but David is kind of a geek. He´s really into "Pleasantville," a fifties, family-style program that plays endlessly on cable TV. David knows every episode by heart. The old television show is a combination of "Father Knows Best," "Ozzie and Harriet," and "Leave It To Beaver," filled with typically vapid fifties TV people and circumstances. Anyway, one night David and Jennifer are fighting over who´s going to get control of their TV set´s remote when they break the thing. Showing up out of the blue to fix it is TV repairman Don Knotts. Like, who better than an old fifties TV guy, right? He gives them a special remote, a super control, that transports both of the teens right into the "Pleasantville" TV show itself! Why? Because it´s a fantasy, you know? But, more important, because it gives the moviemakers a chance to conjure up something different for a change.
Once the kids are caught in this alternative universe TV land, they and everything around them appear in glorious black and white. Now, the movie could have just gone on to make them a part of another vapid situation comedy about kids from the future living in the past. Instead, the filmmakers use the opportunity for social commentary and satire. The kids don´t just become involved in the town of Pleasantville´s ways, they actually change them. Gradually, they teach the TV characters a new life, a new way of living, that helps them to become more human, while in the process reminding the film´s viewers of what it means to be a genuine individual. The TV characters discover art, literature, thought, ideas, love, and, yes, sex.
As the Pleasantville folk begin thinking for themselves and expressing more and more human passions and emotion, they begin one by one turning to color. It is not an easy process for them, nothing so complex as a complete change in mental outlook is simple, but the film does a good job chronicling their slow and sometimes painful transformation from one-dimensional cutouts to fully realized, open-minded human beings.
The two kids are fine in their roles, but it´s William H. Macy who stands out as the television father, a double for Ozzie Nelson, and one of the last persons in town to understand himself. Father may know best, but it takes him a while to catch on. Joan Allen plays the mom, a Donna Reed clone, who finds a new, liberating spirit beneath her gray exterior. Jeff Daniels plays the local soda jerk, a man who realizes a love for aesthetics and a talent for painting hidden under his banal exterior. And J.T. Walsh plays the town´s mayor, the last, unwilling convert to a more liberal lifestyle.
The picture is, of course, entertainment first and foremost, and here it succeeds wonderfully; but on a deeper yet equally obvious level, it is an analogy, a metaphor for our age. It is perhaps on this second level that the filmmakers overreach themselves by trying too hard to cover too many bases. For instance, not satisfied to let us watch people discovering their real selves, the filmmakers also try to show us what happens when the town´s newly established progressive forces clash with the old-line ultraconservatives. When some of the townspeople begin turning colors, they are naturally referred to as the "coloreds" and are forced to do things like sit in the restricted upper balcony in the story´s climactic courtroom scene.
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]1673[/release]