Pleasantville

Director: Gary Ross
Cast:
Jeff Daniels
Joan Allen
Tobey Maguire
William H. Macy
Reese Witherspoon
Genre: Comedy

True, the concept is hokey: two American teens from the present get sucked into a black-and-white TV sitcom against their wishes and have to cope for a while in 1958 before they can come home.

Tobey Maguire is the dorky boy obsessed with the original show (which helps a lot once he gets there), and Reese Witherspoon is his twin sister in name only; she's a spoiled, slutty, popular brat who needs a good dose of the '50s to set her head straight. Once they meet their new TV mom (Joan Allen, who could read the PHONE BOOK and still make you cry) and TV dad (William H. Macy, who could read the SAME phone book and make you laugh), it's off to school, where they must try to keep with the TV script or else the "Pleasantville" world will grind to a terrifying halt. And as is true with all metaphysical time travel movies, vast plot developments are left to your willingly suspended disbelief, and the goings-on are way more parable than science.

Shades of "Back to the Future"? Yeah, sorta, but this one has a zeitgeist all its own. "Pleasantville" sings songs of innocence and experience, each of the black-and-white characters earning his or her right to be in color as he or she learns more of the world. A colored-in girl offers the virginal Tobey Maguire an apple from the tree of knowledge, and we understand; a courtroom drama unfolds as all the "coloreds" sit in the balcony, and we see "To Kill a Mockingbird"; the town meeting starts innocently enough, but then turns into a razor-sharp indictment of the Republican Party. This is a movie that tries it all, folks, and even if they only succeed 25% of the time, that's a DAMN FINE batting average. Kudos to writer Gary Ross for trying to teach a good sociology lesson without boring us out of our skulls.

And the colors? So beautiful. The scenes where Joan Allen and soda jerk owner Jeff Daniels first see Van Gogh and Monet paintings in all their breathtaking hues are innocent and gorgeous; the moments when the pages of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Catcher in the Rye" fill up previously blank pages at the library...it brings back the first, innocent spasms of joy that accompanied those moments in 9th grade when we finally understood what J.D. Salinger was talking about. When Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" replaces Johnny Mathis on Pleasantville's jukebox, I had to elicit a small yelp of joy. I'm a snob like that. You will be too.

—Ian Williams

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