Pleasantville (1998)

Colour my world

[a review written 2001-2002]

The conceit of this film is audaciously silly: squabbling 90s siblings David and Jennifer (Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) find themselves trapped in the 1950s sitcom of the title, where everything really is black and white, the firemen really do rescue cats from trees, and there's no sex because ... there really is no sex. Party girl Jennifer, squirming inside the goody-two-shoes of TV character Mary Sue (a.k.a. “Muffin”), decides that some horizontal action is just the way to liven up Pleasantville, and goes at it with determination. Meanwhile David, a dork addicted to re-runs of the show, tries to play along with his role as Bud and is horrified by his sister's disruptive tactics. All the more so as the other teenagers discover the joys of (ahem) “parking” out at Lover's Lane, start missing the hoop at basketball, and then, one by one, break out in colour.

It would not have been technically possible to pull this off ten, or perhaps even five years earlier, and the vivid design—every frame is a kind of special effect—is reason enough to see the film. The cast, a dream-team of character actors, has also been widely (and rightly) praised, as has the affection the director brings to his subject. (Gary Ross previously wrote the screenplays for Big (1988) and Dave (1993), so this should come as no real surprise.) Beyond this, the disagreement starts, with critics treating the film as merely a patronising commentary on the 1950s, or an argument against nostalgia, or (closer to the mark) a study in 1950s vs. 1990s values. Read in any of these ways, Pleasantville is glib and schematic, and has come in for criticism on both counts.

All of which, to my mind, misses the point.

Pleasantville is a riff on a modern myth: it takes a popular re-telling of the Eden story and reshapes it ... the film is a subversion of a subversion, if you like. The classic examples of the myth are from Star Trek (at least one episode of the original series, and at least two of The Next Generation) and a hundred sci-fi stories before it; the ridiculous Demolition Man (1993) is a more recent version, and the Kevin Bacon teen-flick Footloose (1984) is a variant on the theme. We all know the steps, I think: our hero is trapped in a bland “paradise”, where there is plentiful food and security, but some essential aspect of life is missing; he makes good the lack, struggling against the self-appointed god of the local Eden to do so, and finally leaves it a more ambiguous, but also more vital place.

I've called this story a “myth”, not in the vulgar sense that “it didn't really happen”, but in the more technical sense that it's part of the way we think: a story we tell to explain the way the world is, to position ourselves politically and socially, to understand what kinds of action are possible or desirable, and why. The modern myth is a defiantly unfair reading of Genesis 3, which is part of the point of it: it's an alternative vision of the world.

And this is where Pleasantville comes in. The visitors from the 90s bring colour to the world around them, Jennifer by introducing the locals to the life of the body, David (after initial resistance) by opening up the life of the mind ... but they themselves remain stubbornly monochrome. Jennifer is puzzled: her classmates turn to Technicolor after a single session in the back seat of a car, while she, despite her vigorous exertions, stays grey. “Perhaps it's not just the sex,” suggests David: and indeed it's not. Jennifer catches the reading bug from her brother (“I can't believe you started such a dorky fad,” she tells him) and settles into an evening at home with Lady Chatterley's Lover (a nice touch). It's the first book she's ever sat down to read, and she dismisses her boyfriend in order to follow the story. She falls asleep at her desk with the book open, and wakes up in colour. David's renewal takes longer, and there is a pleasing symmetry about the manner of it, although Ross avoids the obvious path of granting him a sexual awakening. I'll let you find out for yourself, if you haven't already seen the film.

Colour in this story is a sign of wholeness, and the action of the film traces the growth and redemption of persons ... not a struggle between decades, or the declaration of victory by one worldview over another. The difference from the standard script is vast: Kevin Bacon's Ren MacCormack changes Hicksville by re-introducing dance, but is himself unchanged; Jean-Luc Picard reads the aliens a brief moral lecture as the Enterprise departs, but remains, well, Jean-Luc Picard. There is a flat, self-satisfied quality to the modern myth: a “hah, so there!” tone where the crudeness of the religious polemic leaks through to the surface. Pleasantville's metaphor of colour, on the other hand, is all generosity: people are (if you will) surprised by joy, and the countryside blooms around them as they discover sex, literature, art ... and are liberated from whatever was keeping them in grey.

Of course this has social and political implications, and the film's sympathies lie firmly, but not uncritically, with the modern (American) world. There's a good deal of pop psychology floating around as well, although this makes for a more realistic treatment of the issues: resistance to colour, and the changes in Pleasantville, comes from people who are caught up in the system, not (as in the modern myth) from some outside controlling force or a priestly caste. The repressive campaign by J.T.Walsh's mayor is continuous with the embarrassment and confusion of the children's mother, when she discovers sex and colours; and with the disorientation of their father as his certainties, and perhaps his wife, slip away from him. In the scheme of the film there is the Good (colour), there are people with their own hopes, fears and agendas ... and to the extent that these are fighting against colour, there may even be a kind of sin. But apart from the palette, there is not really any black or white.

The parents are treated with a wonderful compassion. Criticism of The American Father has become a tedious cliché on both the small and large screens: William H. Macy's George Parker, by contrast, is presented as a man genuinely confused, trying to do the right thing, but struggling to express his love for his wife in a changed world that he doesn't understand. And as for the mother, Betty Parker, Joan Allen's luminous performance is almost beyond praise. If David is the moral centre of the film, and Jennifer its motor, then their screen mother is its heart. Alone of all the characters, she transcends colour: her values are carried forward, in part, into the new world; and the regret that cuts across her coloured life allows that her previous manner of living was good in its way, however limiting it might have been. In her character at least, polemic has been left far behind.

There are some false notes. The nude window-display, familiar to those who have seen the film, is excessive—a random provocation—in contrast with the delicacy with which the mother is otherwise treated; and the book-burning scene, a crude Nazi analogy, is presumptuous, as well as being unconnected to the wider themes of the film. Critics have more usually attacked the “no coloreds” scenes, but to my mind these are defensible. Surely the point here is that denial of the fulness of human life (colour) and denial of history (the American issue of race) are linked: who is there who would dispute this? The general lightness of the film, on the other hand, seems ill-suited to the treatment of radical evil, of which the Nazis are still the accepted symbol. I can see how someone sensitive to the politics of race might extend the same argument to the “coloreds” scenes ... although I would still beg to differ.

Either way, these are minor concerns. Pleasantville displays more joy and good nature than any Big Idea Flick I could name, and for a film with a religious theme it is pleasingly relaxed. Where Star Trek and its kin are simultaneously coy and heavy-handed in attacking Judeo-Christian thought, Ross' film makes one very explicit reference to Genesis and plays it, successfully, for laughs. And it ends well: by the final reel Pleasantville has turned into something like the real world, and our protagonists are on the way to becoming properly rounded people; for David and Jennifer, and not just the town they have changed, the real story is only just beginning. This is an open-ended vision of life which goes beyond any particular political or social scheme, and is the more realistic for it. Redemption here is not release from What Other People Say, nor is it being Free To Do What We Want: it is openness to a Good that is definite, beyond ourselves, surprising, joyous and alive.

[Check Pleasantville on IMDB and in the New York Times movie pages.]