(2 of 2)
Ross and his team make brilliant use of color technology; the blossoming of each character really does touch the emotions of an openhearted viewer. But the scheme has heavier undertones. For creamy black-and-white read white: white bread, pasty white skin, whites-only neighborhoods, the last decade of white-male culture and, yes, the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan. For color read colored, as in "colored people" and other oppressed minorities--artists seeking free expression, women in search of the apocalyptic orgasm.
The movie sees this emotional colorizing as a good thing. Waking from the prolonged childhood of the '50s (when Ike was the omnipotent dad), America attended to the culture bubbling under its consciousness--to rhythm and blues, to Lenny Bruce and Redd Foxx, to Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover--and took a heroic leap into the enthralling unknown, the flourishing of art, the liberation of race and gender. Yet it can also be argued that the opening of those emotional pores brought a more debased culture: drug epidemics, teen pregnancy, splatter movies, penis-size jokes on every sitcom, Marilyn Manson and Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps the four-letterization of America was not an unalloyed blessing, and the handing of artistic freedom to an infantile culture was not a wise gift.
These views are open to debate--a debate the film doesn't acknowledge. The ultimate irony of Pleasantville is that it is less a '60s movie than a '50s one; it has the didacticism and sentimentality of the serious Hollywood product of that earlier time. That one and this. Stretching credulity but never hedging a bet, Ross wants universal acceptance for his film, so he finally makes the town so endearing that one of the '90s kids decides to stay there. (Gee, wait till Mom finds out!) He hopes you will too. That's the difference between today's best Hollywood filmmakers and the top independent auteurs. Todd Solondz and Hal Hartley don't care if you like, or even get, Happiness or Henry Fool. Ross wants to point a finger while you shake his hand.