Date: Fri 30-Oct-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CAROLL

Quick Words:

Playing-Pleasantville-Daniels

Full Text:

NOW PLAYING: Brilliant Enigma Is "Pleasantville"

By Trey Paul Alexander III

Could Ward and June Cleaver really have been happy? Wasn't their white picket

fence world just a tad too perfect? What was the deal with their sleeping in

two separate beds? They may have thought they were happy, but they couldn't

truly have known bliss. At the very least, they were vastly unenlightened

about "the real world."

That's the point of view taken by Pleasantville , a moral fable from the man

who wrote Big and Dave. George and Betty Parker (William H. Macy and Joan

Allen) are the parents in a '50s TV show, "Pleasantville," the favorite

program of outcast teen David (Tobey Maguire). When David gets into a war of

the clicker with his twin sister, Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), the battling

siblings wreck the TV remote control. Enter an odd repairman (Don Knotts) who

hooks them up with a new, heavy-duty remote that not only powers the

television, but thrusts the two into the fictional world of Pleasantville.

Once in the literally black-and-white world of Pleasantville, David and

Jennifer take on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue, the squeaky-clean offspring of

George and Betty Parker. David, though puzzled by their predicament, finds

comfort in the scripted, familiar world of Pleasantville, but Jennifer wants

out. Yet once she gets a gaze at Mary Sue's dreamboat boyfriend, her desire to

leave is quelled.

A problem arises when Jennifer veers from the script and introduces her steady

to more than holding hands. After the intimate experience, things at

Pleasantville start to change, including the plot lines and color schemes.

Subtle, yet dramatic changes -- the wet petals of a rose spring to bold,

crimson life -- begin to unfold. The introduction of sex transforms the

citizens: teens spend inordinate amounts of time at Lovers Lane; Betty feels

unfulfilled and makes advances towards the soda shop owner (Jeff Daniels), who

is feeling unrealized and pursues ambitions to be a painter; and library books

which had been filled with empty pages are now bursting with words.

While the progressive citizens of Pleasantville experiment and explore -- thus

bringing many into sheer technicolor brilliance -- their monochromatic

counterparts, including the mayor (the late J.T. Walsh) balk at these changes

and begin slandering the "coloreds."

Pleasantville is well acted and, visually, brilliantly conceived, but rather

heavy-handed on the symbolism. The latter half of the film casts the liberal

residents as minorities, going so far as to have storefront signs that read,

"no coloreds allowed." Then the point is hammered home during a courtroom

sequence in which all the full-colored people sit in the balcony a la To Kill

a Mockingbird and its depiction of the treatment of blacks in Smalltown, USA.

This also brings home the film's other flaw: It struggles with the coherency

of its allegorical side. It's one thing if the film was meant as a metaphor

for race relations, but it seems mainly concerned with the idea that

traditional, Biblical values -- or our idyllic view of a society governed by

them -- are inadequate to deal with a society racked by drugs, broken

families, sexually transmitted diseases, etc.

At one point, there's even a Garden of Eden metaphor that casts David and

Jennifer as the serpents who will wrest these people from their faux utopia

and into reality. Yet the movie, ambivalent towards Biblical values, also

ignores why the best-selling book of all time is conspicuously absent during

the literary explosion of Pleasantville. This inconsistency of ideas and the

film's ultimately nihilistic worldview continue to mount until a very

ambiguous, puzzling ending.

Pleasantville is rated PG-13 for profanity and sexual suggestiveness. Though

technically proficient and occasionally funny, it fails to hit its marks

nearly as well as another recent film in the same vein, The Truman Show.