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Starring Tobey MacGuire, Reese Witherspoon, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Jeff Daniels, Don
Knotts, J. T. Walsh, Marley Shelton, Jane Kaczmarek. Written, Produced and Directed by Gary Ross.
David Wagner (MacGuire) is a normal 90's teen leading an affluent suburban life with little pleasure and a lot of stress. His mother (Kaczmarek) is fighting with his father about taking his share of parenting, especially this weekend because she wants to run off to the spa with her new younger boyfriend. His sister Jennifer (Witherspoon) is over-sexed and under-dressed, embarrassed to be related to her nerd brother. David takes refuge in devotedly watching and memorizing a late 50's sitcom called Pleasantville, a black and white world of family values where dinner is always on the table when dad comes home, kids are polite, where sex, passion, creativity and conflict do not exist and everything is, well, swell. As David's mom leaves for her weekend getaway, he gets ready to sit down and watch the Pleasantville marathon starting at 6:30 p.m. Unfortunately Jennifer has arranged a hot date to come over, and she wants to watch an MTV concert. While fighting over the remote, it breaks into pieces. Just then there's a knock on the door. A TV repairman (Knotts) appears and offers them a new remote. When they are fighting over the new remote they are transported into Pleasantville. They become Bud and Mary Sue, the responsible and model teenagers of Betty and George Parker (Allen and Macy). Everything is alway done the same way in Pleasantville. The basketball team always wins. The mayor goes ahead of everybody in the barber shop. At first, David is happy to be there, and Jennifer longs to go back home. But after meeting the town's hunky school basketball star, she decides its not so bad after all. But she doesn't want to play by the town's rules. David cautions Jennifer not to go too far, for she might change things for the worse, (like violating the prime directive in Star Trek). But soon even he can't help causing his new world to change. Suddenly, flowers, books and even people begin to exist in colour. For example, Mr. Johnson (Daniels), the soda shop owner who Bud works for, begins to like changing routines, and begins to paint in vibrant colour. And the people of Pleasantville begin to experience emotions and events, good and bad, and often scary. The earlier Truman Show dealt with a man trapped in a Leave-It-To-Beaver-like sitcom, where he was the star without knowing his life was being filmed with actors he thought were his friends and relatives. In Pleasantville, only Bud and Mary Sue know they are real people, and that the rest in the town are just characters. Despite that, the film does make these characters real. We are able to understand as characters begin to enjoy doing things differently, and can sympathize when decent characters behave irrationally, afraid of the huge changes to their ordered and bland community. Director Ross's screenwriter father was blacklisted during the McCarthy red scare, and the film develops into an indictment of so called family values, where people are persecuted for not following the rigid rules laid out by society. There are no big movie stars to be found (not that there's anything wrong with that), only solid character actors like Macy, Allen, Daniels and Walsh. Forget about Meryl Streep - Joan Allen is the best actress in America (with apologies to Jodie Foster and Jessica Lange). And no annoying accents. Witherspoon and MacGuire are both good, making the changes in their characters believable. The look of the film is excellent. It mixes vibrant colour and shimmering black and white seamlessly. Objects and people begin to turn colour slowly at first, and by the end of the film we begin to understand what causes these changes. Ideas and themes from other great films, such as the Wizard of Oz (Dorothy leaving her troubles to visit a safer new place), To Kill A Mockingbird (the court scene where the "Coloreds" sit in the balcony while the "good" townsfolk sit down below) and even Inherit The Wind and Back To The Future are explored. I look forward to seeing it again, to catch the ideas and references I'm sure I missed the first time. Saving Private Ryan has brilliant action sequences and Beloved has outstanding performances, but Pleasantville is a better movie than either. My favourite film so far this year.  
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