Reality bites, shoots, and stabs
[a review written 2003, when it was still possible to remember the first “reality” shows on radio, and when reality television still felt new ... posted here in honour of the implosion of the Kyle and Jackie O' radio show in Sydney, which reality (without the scare quotes) has recently caught up with]
Maybe eight years ago, when “reality” radio and television started to appear in Australia, my friends and I dismissed it out of hand. More the fool us. The idea that the deliberate creation of dysfunction, for audience tittilation, might be a growing movement — rather than a passing fad — seemed outlandish. Very little seems outlandish now, and some of the early shows, at least in memory, recall to mind a more innocent time. One of the enforced house-mates, a Sydney-based program once luridly announced, was “a lesbian from Newtown”. Well, golly. They must have had to search for a long time to find one of those.
Series 7, a note-perfect satire on reality television, was actually made before Survivor. Someone could see which way the wind was blowing. The self-seriousness of the narrator, the self-dramatisation of the contestants as they talk with the camera, and the complicity of the audience: it's all there, and thrown into sharp relief by the film's premise. In “The Contenders” — the movie presents as the seventh series, shown as a TV marathon — six people are given guns, and an enforced licence to kill each other. The surivivor gets to play the next round, and if they then make it through a third series, to win their freedom.
As sci-fi/satire it's scarcely a new idea, but the movie doesn't so much as gesture towards its predecessors; nor does it indulge in backstory, or spurious social history. The writers have the sense to play it straight. And as a complement to this approach, they've given the starring role to Brooke Smith. That shows such good taste. More than just the girl down the well in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), she was Sonya in Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), the standout actor in that coolest of films. Straightforward and unshowy, she really does look like the girl next door, and it makes her a cinch as Dawn, 33, massively pregnant, the unlikely reigning Contender. With ten kills in two tours, “she has been unstoppable”, and to make things interesting this series is returning her to her home town.
The new contestants are the faux-real cross-section beloved of television: a teenage girl, a chatty loser and father of three, a reclusive old fart, a middle-aged nurse, and a thirtyish artist “living with” terminal illness. No, really. You should hear the atmospheric music that plays in the background; and you absolutely should pay money to see the artist's wife.
Series 7 does have flaws and cop-outs, and they need to be acknowledged. The largest, sad to say, concerns Dawn: like the Jedi in Star Wars, she never has to kill anyone we've identified with. Her ruthlessness is acknowledged from the outset, and we witness some brutal action, but she's protected from anything that would alienate us by gun-jams, chances of timing, and other acts of the deity. It reflects a lack a rigour on the part of the film-makers, an unwillingness to risk the sympathetic nature of the protagonist. It's not clear why they bothered, as Dawn has a compelling excuse for her behaviour (she is eight months gone), a palpable sense of honour, and the weary survivor's pragmatism of Ripley, circa Alien3. It is alarmingly easy to identify with her, and if the writers had been willing to risk her offing a well-developed character, the film could have been taken to a whole new level. The choice of villain is likewise too cheap, and an even-handed contest might have made a stronger point about the human predicament within this “real” world.
Such concerns aside, Series 7 captures the style of editing, and the terribly watchable nature of these shows ... and the need to take a long hot shower after watching. It even takes a prurient interest in the sex-lives of the contestants, in particular the virginity, or otherwise, of 18-year-old Lindsay. Her complicity in the attention, and the posturing of her boyfriend, only add to the quease.
When we talked about the first reality programs, years ago, we worried about obvious things: that in the environment of these shows, things would be broken that could not be fixed; that sooner or later, someone was going to be raped, or badly hurt; that some already-damaged person might be destroyed. The genius of Series 7 is to see that this was never really the point. The literal horror is taken for granted, and it's sadly true that it doesn't revolt as much as it “should”: people are killed all through this program, but with the exception of a particular lethal beating, none of it makes you wince. But one winces every moment at the loss of shame, of self-respect, and of any kind of restraint, not just by the contenders, but by the relentless, sententious voice-over, and the public that it's co-opted to its perspective.
When Dawn's tiny niece embraces her, and declares her love, she turns to the camera to check for audience approval. It's a perfect picture of the corruption that the film attacks, and a better counter-argument to the libertarians could not be devised. Of course it matters; of course it's wrong; of course it should be stopped; and of course it's degenerate, and reflects badly on the lot of us. “We're just showing people what they want to see, per their democratic rights.” And what sainted, selfless heroes you are for doing so. Enough, already.
[Check the film and Brooke Smith on IMDb; there is a rather more negative review of the film on the NYT site.]
Monday, 3 August 2009
Sunday, 21 June 2009
Say Anything ... (1989)
The real world ... as it should be
[a review written in 2002; today is the 19th anniversary of the film's first showing in Australia—a full fourteen months after its US release]
Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again; everyone finds themselves. It's pretty hard to beat that for a plot, and Say Anything ... doesn't try. What it does try is the novel approach of putting real people into a teenage romantic comedy. They are fictional, of course, and as all convention dictates, they come from different worlds. But even before the opening credits are done, it's clear that these characters will be different. For Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Cameron Crowe took “typical” high school students and listened to them, as if they were real; for Say Anything, his directorial debut, he imagines two extraordinary young people, their friends and families, as if he had known them all their lives.
Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), our hero, is one of the great teenage roles. Slightly older and more experienced than his peers (he's spent a year in Germany, where his parents are stationed with the Army), trustworthy, charismatic and mildly under-achieving, he is the kind of guy who is almost universally liked and respected, even if the career counsellor despairs of him. His great passions are kickboxing (“the sport of the future”) and the class valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye), whom he's never formally met. As the film opens we discover Lloyd planning for graduation with his best friends, Corey and D.C. (Lili Taylor and Amy Brooks), who warn him that his crush on Diane is hopeless, and that he's only going to get hurt. “But I want to get hurt,” he declares: and sure enough, he will be.
Diane is heading for trouble of a different kind. We meet her in the act of accepting some bad advice from her father on her graduation speech, and trying to shake off the feeling that something is wrong, or at least missing, in her life. Her problem is that she's in a class of her own, something which is stressed by the school principal in a tactless beat-up that will be wince-inducingly familiar to resident brains everywhere. Diane recovers from all of this by tossing the script and wrapping her speech with a moment of pure class; and then she makes the most momentous decision of her life. Lloyd has gathered the nerve to call her up, inviting her to the end-of-year party that evening, and he fast-talks her with such nervous charm that she accepts.
She almost immediately concludes that she's made a mistake. But Lloyd grows on her through the evening, and the party grows on her too: it helps that it looks like a great party. Everyone is genuinely pleased that she's come, and the affection moves her. Diane has never realised how well-liked she is, and there's a general sense of untapped possibility about her: these scenes are like watching a flower open, and if that sounds like a sexual metaphor, then of course it is. It's pretty clear what Lloyd sees in Diane, while it takes Diane the course of the film to understand what she sees, and needs, in Lloyd. This is both something more, and something more personal, than is seen by his female friends ... but more of this anon.
Although nominally the remarkable one—she has beaten out the entire American graduating class to win a scholarship to study in England—Diane is the more thinly written character; and Ione Skye is the weaker actor. This twin shortfall unbalances the movie, and constitutes its main weakness. But this is an unfair criticism in a way, as Lloyd Dobler is an exceptionally vivid part, and John Cusack's conviction and charisma would have made a star out of an unknown, which of course he was not. Skye will always take second billing, but she is just fine as Diane, and there are some terrific line-readings in amongst the odd awkward moments. She has a lot to live up to: as well as playing opposite Cusack, she must portray a character described by Corey and D.C. as “a brain ... trapped in the body of a game-show hostess”. She is beautiful, in the way that real, beautiful 18-year-old girls are: you can see what all the fuss is about, but it's not enough to rescue her when she's dressed in unflattering clothes; and she looks just awful when she's been crying. The camera does not try to varnish any of this, and it makes it all the more impressive when Diane lights up and shines.
(Skye is one of those minor actors who, after a couple of standout roles, seem to have disappeared from sight. She gave an eye-popping, heart-rending performance as Trudi, the promiscuous elder sister in Gas Food Lodging (1992); since then, her only role to register on radar was in the misbegotten Dream for an Insomniac (1998). A Cusack she is not, and the figure that Taylor and Brooks praised is currently as fashionable as their hairstyles, but does she really deserve this oblivion?)
Diane is supposed to be super-bright, and while this doesn't quite come across, you believe her for a clever and articulate girl. What does come across is how unaffected she is. Her brilliance has had an impact on her life, of course, creating opportunities just as it's cut her off from her classmates, and she's both aware and regretful about this. But she dwells on her mind as little as she thinks about her beauty, and it's this innocence—and her capacity for honesty and trust—that define her role in the action.
Lloyd sees this quality more clearly than Diane's father does, and rather than seeking to exploit her innocence, he wants to protect and enjoy it. This sets up a fundamental conflict between the two men: more fundamental than if they were fighting over Diane's “virtue”. (The couple's sexual relationship is not actually an issue in itself, although it marks the point at which the stakes are raised.) Lloyd is trying to win, and Mr Court trying to keep, Diane's heart, but they are also fighting over two ideas of her best interest ... it's a fight that will be won, in the end, by the better man. For all that, the conflict is not absolute. Lloyd has a wary admiration for the father/daughter bond, and Mr Court in turn is pleasantly surprised by Lloyd. You even see satisfaction on his face, at his daughter's happiness in the relationship. But it's this same concern for her well-being that drives him to separate the young couple: he has all sense and experience on his side, and both Diane and Lloyd know it.
John Mahoney, as James Court, is the film's trump card. Say Anything must be the only teen romance where a parent is characterised with as much care as the teens, and Mahoney caps this with a sensitive interpretation of the role. One expects a screen father to be summed up in a few words, all capitalised—here they would be Doting, Ambitious, Protective—but Mr Court, while driven, has a genuine warmth about him and a surprising sense of fun. He is, as a parent of a Diane Court should be, an original. The official line is that Diane can “say anything” to her father: that he's her best friend. This seems too good to be true, and of course it is ... although having watched Almost Famous (2000), you can see how Crowe might conceive of a parent like this, for a child like Diane. While he is formally the bad guy of the plot, Mr Court becomes a real object of pity, and all without any sudden change in his personality, or the director's sympathy for him.
Sympathy is Crowe's great gift, but it's a kind of weakness as well. He has rightly been criticised for the lack of darkness in his films, and there's clearly no question of them holding up a mirror to all of life. Yet with Lloyd, at least, there's an element of mystery: we have no idea of his relationship with his (absent) parents; his aimlessness hints at trouble ahead. And there's something between confusion and anger that underlies his riffs in conversation, which Crowe and Cusack are wise enough to merely suggest—it's never discussed. It would also seem to undergird his awe of Diane, who is more at peace with herself. When the couple split Lloyd is all at sea, swinging between shattered grief and self-conscious poses of defiance. Whereas Diane, while miserable, still has her prospects and her father ... or so she thinks.
On top of the leading roles, and the famous boom-box sequence, Say Anything offers many small pleasures: the late Kim Walker's “finger quotes”; Joan Cusack's uncredited cameo as Lloyd's big sister Constance; a soundtrack reflecting Crowe's unashamed and discerning taste in pop. And the details are a delight, if sometimes a painful one. Embarrassment is an important part of the comedy, and the embarrassing moments in this film are all the more awful because they're ordinary, and kind of arbitrary: they feel real. The 63 songs that Corey has written about Joe, the guy who's been playing with her head, are all too plausible; and The Pen, familiar to anyone who's seen the film, is something you just wouldn't make up, although one assumes that it's Crowe's invention. He generally has the courage to invent things that others would not, such as the fact that Lloyd's best friends are both girls ... there's even an un-named girl who occupies a circle slightly further out, which is just right. I have no idea how Crowe manages this: ask me how the girl-buddydom sits with Lloyd's taste for kickboxing, and I'm sure I can't tell you, but it works just the same. The characters in Say Anything have flavour, and the difference between this and (say) a John Hughes film is like the difference between a meal and fast food, or between the particular and the generic. Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall) is The Smart Kid in The Breakfast Club (1985)—see, you hadn't remembered the character's name, had you—and everyone is supposed to “recognise” him. Diane Court is a smart girl whom you don't recognise, only because you never happen to have met.
Even the sexual psychology of the characters is plausibly off-beat. While no-one in the film draws attention to it, or even seems to notice, with a father like James Court it's clear how a girl might settle for a lover like Lloyd Dobler. This doesn't conform to the current taste for female empowerment ... but note that while the lovers are traditional masculine and feminine types, their roles have been completely reversed: Diane is the smart one, on whom location, career and money will depend; Lloyd is the nurturing one, the unfailing personal support on whom the couple's true happiness will rest. There is not a hint of gender anxiety here—okay, so Crowe's an optimist—but just think how much more radical this is than the vogue for chicks who kick ass, be they mystically enhanced (Gellar), genetically enhanced (Alba), generally improbable (Jovovich) or just plain astonishing (Rodriguez). With the abundance of clever girls, and the shortage of slim-waisted things who can demolish men twice their bodyweight, one wonders why we see quite so many fight scenes, and so few female breadwinners. Or, one might wonder, if the answer were not so obvious. Female empowerment might be in, but pandering to mainstream fantasies is compulsory.
Lloyd and Diane are a fantasy of a different kind, one that might actually happen. Revolutionary as this is, part of the charm of the film is that no wider point is being made: there is no message that a successful woman needs a supportive man behind her. The message is that Diane Court needs Lloyd Dobler, and by film's end she has him. Along with Diane's father you might fear for them, and wonder if this can work: if someone like Lloyd can follow his girl wherever she needs to go, and truly find his happiness in securing hers. One senses real risk for the couple after the final reel—unusual in romantic comedy—and Crowe's final act of brilliance is to have them acknowledge it. The effect, of course, is only to deepen the romance, and to crown this remarkable, original film with one of the most perfect endings you will ever see.
[Check the film and the director on IMDB. If you don't care about serious spoilers, Roger Ebert has reviewed the film twice: for the 1989 release, and in 2002.]
[a review written in 2002; today is the 19th anniversary of the film's first showing in Australia—a full fourteen months after its US release]
Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again; everyone finds themselves. It's pretty hard to beat that for a plot, and Say Anything ... doesn't try. What it does try is the novel approach of putting real people into a teenage romantic comedy. They are fictional, of course, and as all convention dictates, they come from different worlds. But even before the opening credits are done, it's clear that these characters will be different. For Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Cameron Crowe took “typical” high school students and listened to them, as if they were real; for Say Anything, his directorial debut, he imagines two extraordinary young people, their friends and families, as if he had known them all their lives.
Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), our hero, is one of the great teenage roles. Slightly older and more experienced than his peers (he's spent a year in Germany, where his parents are stationed with the Army), trustworthy, charismatic and mildly under-achieving, he is the kind of guy who is almost universally liked and respected, even if the career counsellor despairs of him. His great passions are kickboxing (“the sport of the future”) and the class valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye), whom he's never formally met. As the film opens we discover Lloyd planning for graduation with his best friends, Corey and D.C. (Lili Taylor and Amy Brooks), who warn him that his crush on Diane is hopeless, and that he's only going to get hurt. “But I want to get hurt,” he declares: and sure enough, he will be.
Diane is heading for trouble of a different kind. We meet her in the act of accepting some bad advice from her father on her graduation speech, and trying to shake off the feeling that something is wrong, or at least missing, in her life. Her problem is that she's in a class of her own, something which is stressed by the school principal in a tactless beat-up that will be wince-inducingly familiar to resident brains everywhere. Diane recovers from all of this by tossing the script and wrapping her speech with a moment of pure class; and then she makes the most momentous decision of her life. Lloyd has gathered the nerve to call her up, inviting her to the end-of-year party that evening, and he fast-talks her with such nervous charm that she accepts.
She almost immediately concludes that she's made a mistake. But Lloyd grows on her through the evening, and the party grows on her too: it helps that it looks like a great party. Everyone is genuinely pleased that she's come, and the affection moves her. Diane has never realised how well-liked she is, and there's a general sense of untapped possibility about her: these scenes are like watching a flower open, and if that sounds like a sexual metaphor, then of course it is. It's pretty clear what Lloyd sees in Diane, while it takes Diane the course of the film to understand what she sees, and needs, in Lloyd. This is both something more, and something more personal, than is seen by his female friends ... but more of this anon.
Although nominally the remarkable one—she has beaten out the entire American graduating class to win a scholarship to study in England—Diane is the more thinly written character; and Ione Skye is the weaker actor. This twin shortfall unbalances the movie, and constitutes its main weakness. But this is an unfair criticism in a way, as Lloyd Dobler is an exceptionally vivid part, and John Cusack's conviction and charisma would have made a star out of an unknown, which of course he was not. Skye will always take second billing, but she is just fine as Diane, and there are some terrific line-readings in amongst the odd awkward moments. She has a lot to live up to: as well as playing opposite Cusack, she must portray a character described by Corey and D.C. as “a brain ... trapped in the body of a game-show hostess”. She is beautiful, in the way that real, beautiful 18-year-old girls are: you can see what all the fuss is about, but it's not enough to rescue her when she's dressed in unflattering clothes; and she looks just awful when she's been crying. The camera does not try to varnish any of this, and it makes it all the more impressive when Diane lights up and shines.
(Skye is one of those minor actors who, after a couple of standout roles, seem to have disappeared from sight. She gave an eye-popping, heart-rending performance as Trudi, the promiscuous elder sister in Gas Food Lodging (1992); since then, her only role to register on radar was in the misbegotten Dream for an Insomniac (1998). A Cusack she is not, and the figure that Taylor and Brooks praised is currently as fashionable as their hairstyles, but does she really deserve this oblivion?)
Diane is supposed to be super-bright, and while this doesn't quite come across, you believe her for a clever and articulate girl. What does come across is how unaffected she is. Her brilliance has had an impact on her life, of course, creating opportunities just as it's cut her off from her classmates, and she's both aware and regretful about this. But she dwells on her mind as little as she thinks about her beauty, and it's this innocence—and her capacity for honesty and trust—that define her role in the action.
Lloyd sees this quality more clearly than Diane's father does, and rather than seeking to exploit her innocence, he wants to protect and enjoy it. This sets up a fundamental conflict between the two men: more fundamental than if they were fighting over Diane's “virtue”. (The couple's sexual relationship is not actually an issue in itself, although it marks the point at which the stakes are raised.) Lloyd is trying to win, and Mr Court trying to keep, Diane's heart, but they are also fighting over two ideas of her best interest ... it's a fight that will be won, in the end, by the better man. For all that, the conflict is not absolute. Lloyd has a wary admiration for the father/daughter bond, and Mr Court in turn is pleasantly surprised by Lloyd. You even see satisfaction on his face, at his daughter's happiness in the relationship. But it's this same concern for her well-being that drives him to separate the young couple: he has all sense and experience on his side, and both Diane and Lloyd know it.
John Mahoney, as James Court, is the film's trump card. Say Anything must be the only teen romance where a parent is characterised with as much care as the teens, and Mahoney caps this with a sensitive interpretation of the role. One expects a screen father to be summed up in a few words, all capitalised—here they would be Doting, Ambitious, Protective—but Mr Court, while driven, has a genuine warmth about him and a surprising sense of fun. He is, as a parent of a Diane Court should be, an original. The official line is that Diane can “say anything” to her father: that he's her best friend. This seems too good to be true, and of course it is ... although having watched Almost Famous (2000), you can see how Crowe might conceive of a parent like this, for a child like Diane. While he is formally the bad guy of the plot, Mr Court becomes a real object of pity, and all without any sudden change in his personality, or the director's sympathy for him.
Sympathy is Crowe's great gift, but it's a kind of weakness as well. He has rightly been criticised for the lack of darkness in his films, and there's clearly no question of them holding up a mirror to all of life. Yet with Lloyd, at least, there's an element of mystery: we have no idea of his relationship with his (absent) parents; his aimlessness hints at trouble ahead. And there's something between confusion and anger that underlies his riffs in conversation, which Crowe and Cusack are wise enough to merely suggest—it's never discussed. It would also seem to undergird his awe of Diane, who is more at peace with herself. When the couple split Lloyd is all at sea, swinging between shattered grief and self-conscious poses of defiance. Whereas Diane, while miserable, still has her prospects and her father ... or so she thinks.
On top of the leading roles, and the famous boom-box sequence, Say Anything offers many small pleasures: the late Kim Walker's “finger quotes”; Joan Cusack's uncredited cameo as Lloyd's big sister Constance; a soundtrack reflecting Crowe's unashamed and discerning taste in pop. And the details are a delight, if sometimes a painful one. Embarrassment is an important part of the comedy, and the embarrassing moments in this film are all the more awful because they're ordinary, and kind of arbitrary: they feel real. The 63 songs that Corey has written about Joe, the guy who's been playing with her head, are all too plausible; and The Pen, familiar to anyone who's seen the film, is something you just wouldn't make up, although one assumes that it's Crowe's invention. He generally has the courage to invent things that others would not, such as the fact that Lloyd's best friends are both girls ... there's even an un-named girl who occupies a circle slightly further out, which is just right. I have no idea how Crowe manages this: ask me how the girl-buddydom sits with Lloyd's taste for kickboxing, and I'm sure I can't tell you, but it works just the same. The characters in Say Anything have flavour, and the difference between this and (say) a John Hughes film is like the difference between a meal and fast food, or between the particular and the generic. Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall) is The Smart Kid in The Breakfast Club (1985)—see, you hadn't remembered the character's name, had you—and everyone is supposed to “recognise” him. Diane Court is a smart girl whom you don't recognise, only because you never happen to have met.
Even the sexual psychology of the characters is plausibly off-beat. While no-one in the film draws attention to it, or even seems to notice, with a father like James Court it's clear how a girl might settle for a lover like Lloyd Dobler. This doesn't conform to the current taste for female empowerment ... but note that while the lovers are traditional masculine and feminine types, their roles have been completely reversed: Diane is the smart one, on whom location, career and money will depend; Lloyd is the nurturing one, the unfailing personal support on whom the couple's true happiness will rest. There is not a hint of gender anxiety here—okay, so Crowe's an optimist—but just think how much more radical this is than the vogue for chicks who kick ass, be they mystically enhanced (Gellar), genetically enhanced (Alba), generally improbable (Jovovich) or just plain astonishing (Rodriguez). With the abundance of clever girls, and the shortage of slim-waisted things who can demolish men twice their bodyweight, one wonders why we see quite so many fight scenes, and so few female breadwinners. Or, one might wonder, if the answer were not so obvious. Female empowerment might be in, but pandering to mainstream fantasies is compulsory.
Lloyd and Diane are a fantasy of a different kind, one that might actually happen. Revolutionary as this is, part of the charm of the film is that no wider point is being made: there is no message that a successful woman needs a supportive man behind her. The message is that Diane Court needs Lloyd Dobler, and by film's end she has him. Along with Diane's father you might fear for them, and wonder if this can work: if someone like Lloyd can follow his girl wherever she needs to go, and truly find his happiness in securing hers. One senses real risk for the couple after the final reel—unusual in romantic comedy—and Crowe's final act of brilliance is to have them acknowledge it. The effect, of course, is only to deepen the romance, and to crown this remarkable, original film with one of the most perfect endings you will ever see.
[Check the film and the director on IMDB. If you don't care about serious spoilers, Roger Ebert has reviewed the film twice: for the 1989 release, and in 2002.]
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
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.]
[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.]
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