"Pleasantville," written and directed by Gary Ross, is a whimsical and uplifting movie that tells the story of two modern teenagers who are sucked into a 1950s television series named, well, "Pleasantville."
Given a magic remote by a demonic TV repairman played by Don Knotts, Dave (Tobey Maguire) and his sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) enter the world of Pleasantville only to change the inhabitants of that fictional town irreversibly.
The plot of the movie is well done, moving smoothly from the time when the characters first enter Pleasantville to the final moral of the story.
Unfortunately, the very beginning of the movie is somewhat less than quality, leaving a strange lacking feeling. I thought the beginning was too slow, and oddly I have heard others say that it was too fast. Any way you look at it though, the first 15 minutes or so are definitely not up to the standard of the rest of the film.
At the start, we get the most rudimentary kind of introduction to the hero and heroine of the movie.
They come from a bad home with divorced parents who really don't care about them. Dave deals with it by becoming obsessed with the perfect world of Pleasantville and Jennifer deals by becoming, well, a self-proclaimed slut.
On the night of Jennifer's latest big date, Dave wants to watch the Pleasantville marathon on the fictional equivalent of Nick-at-Nite. In the ensuing fight over TV control, the remote breaks and both siblings are thrown into the depths of despair.
Fortunately, Don Knotts shows up like the Devil coming out of Hell and gives Dave a new remote which then zaps brother and sister into the world of television where there are no toilets, everyone does the same thing day after day, the basketball team never loses and holding hands is as far as anyone goes. Ever.
Dave loves it, Jennifer does not. She sets out to have the same kind of good time in Pleasantville that she had in the real world. Much to Dave's horror, things begin to change. People start acting like people and life is much less predictable and ... pleasant.
Basically, "Pleasantville" is a modern fable which pretty convincingly makes the statement that we shouldn't look back at the past as a perfect. More importantly, it declares that trouble and danger are better than predictability because they allow us to feel those strong emotions which are the very things which make us human.
Both the filming and acting are superb. The visual effects of the black and white combined with the gradually increasing color of various people and objects are extremely interesting. In addition, the sets are extremely meticulous and look exactly like they could have come from a real 1950s sitcom.
Performances by Maguire and Witherspoon are convincing as the modern observers in the film.
It is particularly interesting to watch the development of both of their characters through the movie as Dave becomes a reluctant hero and Jennifer realizes that the
re is more to life than sex.
However, perhaps the best acting in the film comes from Joan Allen who plays Betty Parker, the TV mother.
Her character, initially flat and stereotypically sitcom, first shows a real desperation and need for change, and then becomes a real and very confused person with all the complicated desires that people have.
I strongly recommend seeing "Pleasantville" as soon as you are physically able to. It's not a particularly complex movie, but it's one of the few movies where the entire audience literally cheers multiple times during the film.
The development of color and reality in the "Pleasantville" world keeps the audience on the edge of its seat waiting for that next flash of color to show through, waiting to see who stops being just black and white next and waiting to see how it ends.
