Ah, the '50s! A decade of picket fences and placid smiles, of front lawns without weeds and a future without care, when children were wise enough to respect their parents--because Father knew best.
Rotten, wasn't it? People did what they were supposed to do, not what they deeply, truly needed to. It was a time of confinement: those wire bras were a chastity belt for bosoms. Haircuts were part of the hypocrisy--boys couldn't hide their ears, but they could, had to, suppress their liveliest instincts. It was the long night of the living dead.
That's the not-so-hidden agenda of Pleasantville, an epic-size, largely entertaining parable of repression and awakening from writer-director Gary Ross. The movie imagines that two teenagers, David (Tobey Maguire) and his randy sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), are magically transported from the '90s into the small, sleepy town of David's favorite '50s sitcom. The "knows-best" father, George (William H. Macy), and his wife Betty (Joan Allen), all starched sweetness, are convinced that David is Bud, a.k.a. Sport, and that Jennifer, now outfitted in a poodle-skirt-and-sweater set, is Mary Sue--Muffin to her doting dad. Weirdest of all, the whole town is in black-and-white. "We're supposed to be at home, David," Jennifer scolds her brother. "We're supposed to be in color."
In outline, Pleasantville sounds like the most derivative movie of all time: a bit of Back to the Future (teen time travel), a whit of The Wizard of Oz (the color of dreams), a plot from The Purple Rose of Cairo (with actor Jeff Daniels linking two stories of real and reel life), a lot from The Truman Show (except that here everyone in town believes in the grand fiction of a perfectly ordered society). But Ross, who helped create two other fantasies of displacement, Big and Dave, has more in mind: Follow your heart, not the rules. And '50s bad, '60s good.
Be it known that whatever its message, the movie bubbles over with felicities. The actors, once they get over their early overplaying, are uniformly splendid. Ross gets plenty of smart fun from the collision of '50s and '90s: a "healthy" breakfast loaded with pork products, a mother-daughter sex talk in which Muffin explains the facts of life to Mom. Carpeting the film is Randy Newman's richest score, tremulous and true to the period; those yearning violins express an ache the Pleasantvillagers don't yet know they have.
This Pleasantville, this Bedford Falls, this Brigadoon, this Springfield, you see, is really Stepford--a place so sanitized there are no toilets or double beds, a people so insular they have never known what it's like to feel unprogrammed joy or lust or rage or bravery or intellectual adventure. When they finally open themselves to these emotions (by gazing at a Picasso or hearing Buddy Holly or spending the evening with a naughty girl from the '90s), the people of Pleasantville literally blush into color. They wear their passion on their shamed, fervent faces, on their clothes, like a scarlet letter. And the town burghers, still cocooned in monochrome propriety, are perplexed, vexed, vengeful.