No coloring outside the lines (and not much in): a review of Pleasantville.
Finally saw Pleasantville, the 1998 comedy-fantasy of writer-director Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) that helped put Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon on the map. (That's them in the foreground, below.)
I remember much ink being spilled regarding Pleasantville's then state-of-the-art video effects (i.e., color gradually seeping into a black & white world) and a stand-out scene with Joan Allen; sad to say, these are pretty much the only redeeming features of Pleasantville, and in a two-hour movie, that makes for a very thin gruel indeed.
A high school loser named David (Tobey Maguire) who has a passion for an idealized -- and insipid -- TV sitcom from the 1950s named "Pleasantville" gets sucked into its milieu, along with his round-heels sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), thanks to a magic TV remote provided by a TV repairman played by Don Knotts who providentially appears after they've broken their own remote while wrestling for control of it. David and Jennifer find themselves cast as Bud and Mary Sue (nicknamed "Muffin"), the children of the main family of "Pleasantville," the Parkers: George (William H. Macy) and Betty (Joan Allen). David convinces Jennifer to play along until they can figure out how to go back to their own reality, but Jennifer/Mary Sue/Muffin uses her 1990s mores to whip up a heapin' helpin' of late 1950s "bad girl" trouble (think of Mara Corday, Marie Windsor or Mamie Van Doren), which soon has the high school basketball team blowing their shots on the court because they're scoring big time on Lovers' Lane, and sees some of the Pleasantville teens turning Technicolor. (She even convinces her TV mom Betty to have a bathtub adventure, which causes the tree outside the Parkers' house to ignite; even Pleasantville the 1998 movie couldn't show the real "burning bush" and keep its PG-13 rating.) Meanwhile, David/Bud starts turning on the young'uns to the joys of reading -- as he spiels synopses of the books he's read, their blank pages have writing and illustrations magically flow across them -- and clues in his TV boss, Mr. Johnson (Jeff Daniels), into the joys of painting pictures with color. Pleasantville's mayor, Big Bob (J.T. Walsh) leads the citizenry who would rather that everything stayed simple and black and white -- George Parker being one of the conservatives -- and complications ensue for all and sundry, until a cornball town hall meeting puts paid to "Pleasantville"'s reruns.
While the notion of a 1950s sitcom being ganked into a closer relationship to reality is an interesting notion for a Twilight Zone episode, it could've -- it should've -- been handled in a half hour's time, or certainly in no more than an hour's time. The dialogue is leaden throughout -- there's little to distinguish the closed loop of the world of "Pleasantville" from the hot-n'-now world of David and Jennifer -- making one yearn for a Frank Capra movie, any Frank Capra movie. That Jennifer would get so bored with being Pleasantville's town pump -- the lack of competition means that carving another notch in her lipstick case is about as difficult as clubbing a baby seal -- that she actually starts to read is an amusing conceit, but Ross doesn't know how to handle it: she goes from remembering the first half or so of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which was all that she'd read of it in her reality) to taking up D.H. Lawrence because he's "kind of sexy," as if all of D.H. Lawrence's work was nothing more than a Ken Russell movie with naked "Angry Young Man" stars wrestling each other in a barnyard while stunted and sexless women watch in mixed apprehension and attraction (cf. Women in Love, 1969); the shot of her wearing Mary Sue's/Muffin's cat-eye glasses and discussing literature with another bespectacled (though butch) student rings hilariously false.
While it's a bookworm's daydream for reading to become more popular, the fact that at least half of Pleasantville is utterly enraptured by lit'rchur thanks to the spielings of David/Bud is utterly risible: at minimum, there should've been a lot more push-back from the townies (the way there was against Mr. Johnson's murals on his diner's windows) against many of the specific books that appeared thanks to David/Bud, including Huckleberry Finn, instead of a generic book burning; at maximum, there should've also been different TV shows and movies appearing, as David/Bud remembered them: j.d. and giant bug movies, sure, but also things like On the Waterfront, Baby Doll, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, Playhouse 90 and The Philco Television Playhouse (which aired scripts by the likes of Rod Serling and Paddy Chayesfsky, respectively); Your Show of Shows and its successor, Caesar's Hour; the thinly-veiled sexual shenanigans of Rear Window, Vertigo, and North By Northwest; even The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone, which both debuted in 1959. And as far as books go, the reading list is notable chiefly for its glaring omissions: where's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Animal Farm (1945), The Naked and the Dead (1948), The City and the Pillar (1948), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), The Second Sex (1949), Pull My Daisy (1951), A Streetcar Named Desire (play published in 1947; first filmed in 1951), Howl and Other Poems (1956), On the Road (1957), even, Onan help us, the execrable and deeply boring Tropic of Cancer (1934, but unpublished in the U.S. until 1961)?
Jeff Daniels' Bill Johnson is so inarticulate and repressed, he comes off as autistic, if not mentally feeble: even after he "comes in colors everywhere," he appears more stunted than William H. Macy's even more repressed and childlike ("Where's my food??") George Parker, which is surely a mistake on Ross' part, and not exactly a ringing endorsement of Modernism in any case. The other inhabitants of Pleasantville aren't developed beyond their either liking some combination of sex, books and living in color, or not.
Ross is pretty stumble-footed about inserting social allegory into his turgid little fantasy: scenes of the b&w townies torching the contents of the library recall the book burnings of Nazi Germany, while the conflict between the conservatives and the enlightened is meant to suggest the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, what with the b&w'ers sneeringly referring to their awakened brethren as "coloreds." This is apt to come off as pretty queasy to a modern audience, however, given that Pleasantville the TV show town and Pleasantville the movie have more white faces than a Nüremburg rally, in keeping with TV show conventions of the '50s. While I half expected J.T. Walsh's mayor to hold McCarthy-like hearings -- "Are you now or have you ever been -- a colored?" -- happily, this did not come to pass.
Perhaps the biggest mishap that Ross makes is in the denouement: David's/Bud's whispered entreaties to his TV father George are meant to be so stirring that they persuade all of the die-hards in the town hall, including the mayor. One problem is that David/Bud's spiel is more than a little skeevy: he sounds as though he's pimping out his TV mother Betty ("Look at her; isn't she pretty?"); he certainly doesn't call attention to her personality, her need to develop as her own person, to be more than a Betty Crocker-cum-scullery wench, which is (or should be) at least as much as the point to her awakening as to explore her own sexuality. The other problem is purely logistical; that town hall must have one hell of a set of acoustics for David's/Bud's whispers to be heard in every nook and cranny.
Ross also flubs the conversion of Don Knotts' TV repairman. Knotts' character is initially presented as someone who loves the show "Pleasantville" because to him it represents a veritable Eisenhowerean Arcadia where nothing ever changes, and all of life's complications are simple enough to be solved in a twenty-five minute episode with commercial breaks. While this is a big reason for the show's appeal to David as well, David at least is savvy enough to realize the fallacy of this shortly after he finds himself actually living in Pleasantville; Knotts' character is never shown as being swayed by David's POV (and one gets the idea that the TV repairman, like George, is pre-sexual; at least we don't see Knotts' character taking a turn as Cotton Mather and calling for Jennifer to be clapped in the stocks, or worse), but, after all of Pleasantville gains all the colors of the rainbow, BAM, there he is, misty-eyed and wistfully grinning, pulling slowly away from David and Jennifer's house. This throwaway bit shows that even Ross himself was heartily sick of his own conceit at last, and anxious to just end the bloody thing as quickly as possible.
And another thing: only David returns to reality; Jennifer stays in the newly opened world of Pleasantville to go to college as Mary Sue/Muffin (although one might well argue that she merely chose to change the inspiration for her wardrobe from Frederick's of Hollywood to Gidget; if the only books she likes are the ones that give her a sexual charge, it's highly debatable how much she's sublimated her sexual energy), causing nary a ripple of concern in their real-world, divorced mother (Jane Kaczmarek, of the TV sitcom Malcolm in the Middle). While allowing that Kaczmarek's character was shown to be gloriously self-involved, you'd think that she would've at least quizzed David as to how long Jennifer was going to be away, if only so she could adjust her grocery shopping activities accordingly.
Ross can't plead that Pleasantville was too chockablock with incident for him to concern himself with such trifles: the movie was on life support after its first thirty or forty minutes, if indeed it lived and breathed for that long. This is just another example of movie makers being more concerned with their visual effects than with their audiences; what a sorry state of affairs that this turkey earned as much money and critical raves as it did.
I remember much ink being spilled regarding Pleasantville's then state-of-the-art video effects (i.e., color gradually seeping into a black & white world) and a stand-out scene with Joan Allen; sad to say, these are pretty much the only redeeming features of Pleasantville, and in a two-hour movie, that makes for a very thin gruel indeed.
A high school loser named David (Tobey Maguire) who has a passion for an idealized -- and insipid -- TV sitcom from the 1950s named "Pleasantville" gets sucked into its milieu, along with his round-heels sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), thanks to a magic TV remote provided by a TV repairman played by Don Knotts who providentially appears after they've broken their own remote while wrestling for control of it. David and Jennifer find themselves cast as Bud and Mary Sue (nicknamed "Muffin"), the children of the main family of "Pleasantville," the Parkers: George (William H. Macy) and Betty (Joan Allen). David convinces Jennifer to play along until they can figure out how to go back to their own reality, but Jennifer/Mary Sue/Muffin uses her 1990s mores to whip up a heapin' helpin' of late 1950s "bad girl" trouble (think of Mara Corday, Marie Windsor or Mamie Van Doren), which soon has the high school basketball team blowing their shots on the court because they're scoring big time on Lovers' Lane, and sees some of the Pleasantville teens turning Technicolor. (She even convinces her TV mom Betty to have a bathtub adventure, which causes the tree outside the Parkers' house to ignite; even Pleasantville the 1998 movie couldn't show the real "burning bush" and keep its PG-13 rating.) Meanwhile, David/Bud starts turning on the young'uns to the joys of reading -- as he spiels synopses of the books he's read, their blank pages have writing and illustrations magically flow across them -- and clues in his TV boss, Mr. Johnson (Jeff Daniels), into the joys of painting pictures with color. Pleasantville's mayor, Big Bob (J.T. Walsh) leads the citizenry who would rather that everything stayed simple and black and white -- George Parker being one of the conservatives -- and complications ensue for all and sundry, until a cornball town hall meeting puts paid to "Pleasantville"'s reruns.
While the notion of a 1950s sitcom being ganked into a closer relationship to reality is an interesting notion for a Twilight Zone episode, it could've -- it should've -- been handled in a half hour's time, or certainly in no more than an hour's time. The dialogue is leaden throughout -- there's little to distinguish the closed loop of the world of "Pleasantville" from the hot-n'-now world of David and Jennifer -- making one yearn for a Frank Capra movie, any Frank Capra movie. That Jennifer would get so bored with being Pleasantville's town pump -- the lack of competition means that carving another notch in her lipstick case is about as difficult as clubbing a baby seal -- that she actually starts to read is an amusing conceit, but Ross doesn't know how to handle it: she goes from remembering the first half or so of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which was all that she'd read of it in her reality) to taking up D.H. Lawrence because he's "kind of sexy," as if all of D.H. Lawrence's work was nothing more than a Ken Russell movie with naked "Angry Young Man" stars wrestling each other in a barnyard while stunted and sexless women watch in mixed apprehension and attraction (cf. Women in Love, 1969); the shot of her wearing Mary Sue's/Muffin's cat-eye glasses and discussing literature with another bespectacled (though butch) student rings hilariously false.
While it's a bookworm's daydream for reading to become more popular, the fact that at least half of Pleasantville is utterly enraptured by lit'rchur thanks to the spielings of David/Bud is utterly risible: at minimum, there should've been a lot more push-back from the townies (the way there was against Mr. Johnson's murals on his diner's windows) against many of the specific books that appeared thanks to David/Bud, including Huckleberry Finn, instead of a generic book burning; at maximum, there should've also been different TV shows and movies appearing, as David/Bud remembered them: j.d. and giant bug movies, sure, but also things like On the Waterfront, Baby Doll, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, Playhouse 90 and The Philco Television Playhouse (which aired scripts by the likes of Rod Serling and Paddy Chayesfsky, respectively); Your Show of Shows and its successor, Caesar's Hour; the thinly-veiled sexual shenanigans of Rear Window, Vertigo, and North By Northwest; even The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone, which both debuted in 1959. And as far as books go, the reading list is notable chiefly for its glaring omissions: where's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Animal Farm (1945), The Naked and the Dead (1948), The City and the Pillar (1948), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), The Second Sex (1949), Pull My Daisy (1951), A Streetcar Named Desire (play published in 1947; first filmed in 1951), Howl and Other Poems (1956), On the Road (1957), even, Onan help us, the execrable and deeply boring Tropic of Cancer (1934, but unpublished in the U.S. until 1961)?
Jeff Daniels' Bill Johnson is so inarticulate and repressed, he comes off as autistic, if not mentally feeble: even after he "comes in colors everywhere," he appears more stunted than William H. Macy's even more repressed and childlike ("Where's my food??") George Parker, which is surely a mistake on Ross' part, and not exactly a ringing endorsement of Modernism in any case. The other inhabitants of Pleasantville aren't developed beyond their either liking some combination of sex, books and living in color, or not.
Ross is pretty stumble-footed about inserting social allegory into his turgid little fantasy: scenes of the b&w townies torching the contents of the library recall the book burnings of Nazi Germany, while the conflict between the conservatives and the enlightened is meant to suggest the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, what with the b&w'ers sneeringly referring to their awakened brethren as "coloreds." This is apt to come off as pretty queasy to a modern audience, however, given that Pleasantville the TV show town and Pleasantville the movie have more white faces than a Nüremburg rally, in keeping with TV show conventions of the '50s. While I half expected J.T. Walsh's mayor to hold McCarthy-like hearings -- "Are you now or have you ever been -- a colored?" -- happily, this did not come to pass.
Perhaps the biggest mishap that Ross makes is in the denouement: David's/Bud's whispered entreaties to his TV father George are meant to be so stirring that they persuade all of the die-hards in the town hall, including the mayor. One problem is that David/Bud's spiel is more than a little skeevy: he sounds as though he's pimping out his TV mother Betty ("Look at her; isn't she pretty?"); he certainly doesn't call attention to her personality, her need to develop as her own person, to be more than a Betty Crocker-cum-scullery wench, which is (or should be) at least as much as the point to her awakening as to explore her own sexuality. The other problem is purely logistical; that town hall must have one hell of a set of acoustics for David's/Bud's whispers to be heard in every nook and cranny.
Ross also flubs the conversion of Don Knotts' TV repairman. Knotts' character is initially presented as someone who loves the show "Pleasantville" because to him it represents a veritable Eisenhowerean Arcadia where nothing ever changes, and all of life's complications are simple enough to be solved in a twenty-five minute episode with commercial breaks. While this is a big reason for the show's appeal to David as well, David at least is savvy enough to realize the fallacy of this shortly after he finds himself actually living in Pleasantville; Knotts' character is never shown as being swayed by David's POV (and one gets the idea that the TV repairman, like George, is pre-sexual; at least we don't see Knotts' character taking a turn as Cotton Mather and calling for Jennifer to be clapped in the stocks, or worse), but, after all of Pleasantville gains all the colors of the rainbow, BAM, there he is, misty-eyed and wistfully grinning, pulling slowly away from David and Jennifer's house. This throwaway bit shows that even Ross himself was heartily sick of his own conceit at last, and anxious to just end the bloody thing as quickly as possible.
And another thing: only David returns to reality; Jennifer stays in the newly opened world of Pleasantville to go to college as Mary Sue/Muffin (although one might well argue that she merely chose to change the inspiration for her wardrobe from Frederick's of Hollywood to Gidget; if the only books she likes are the ones that give her a sexual charge, it's highly debatable how much she's sublimated her sexual energy), causing nary a ripple of concern in their real-world, divorced mother (Jane Kaczmarek, of the TV sitcom Malcolm in the Middle). While allowing that Kaczmarek's character was shown to be gloriously self-involved, you'd think that she would've at least quizzed David as to how long Jennifer was going to be away, if only so she could adjust her grocery shopping activities accordingly.
Ross can't plead that Pleasantville was too chockablock with incident for him to concern himself with such trifles: the movie was on life support after its first thirty or forty minutes, if indeed it lived and breathed for that long. This is just another example of movie makers being more concerned with their visual effects than with their audiences; what a sorry state of affairs that this turkey earned as much money and critical raves as it did.