Pleasantville **** (1998, Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, Reese Witherspoon) – Classic Movie Review 678

Writer-director Gary Ross’s 1998 fantasy comedy is an extremely pleasant, thought-provoking and beautifully crafted comic fable about a boy David (Tobey Maguire) and his sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) who are magicked into a TV channel that just shows old black and white 50s sitcom reruns.

In the clichéd American small town of Pleasantville, everything is, er, pleasant, with firemen rushing out solely to rescue cats (in the absence of any fires), books with blank pages and a mayor (the late, lamented J T Walsh) just trying to keep things pleasant. Oh, and everyone’s black and white, and so is everything.

The siblings get new sitcom-style parents (Joan Allen, William H Macy) and soon bring unpleasant things into town – fire, sex, rain, text for books and, worst of all, colour for paintings and human beings. Everyone’s aghast and prejudice starts; ‘no coloureds’ signs appear, and the townsfolk try to organise to stop the colour rot.

But the boy Maguire teaches everybody it’s a good thing to have chaos and passion, even if it’s rage and anger. Mom leaves dad with prepared dinners for the colour artist Jeff Daniels, and they become coloured themselves.

Soon the boy turns everybody coloured and paints the whole town red (and yellow and blue etc) and all ends well, uncertainly, but well. They’ve admitted chaos and passion, and that there are no ‘shoulds’ and can progress tentatively.

Gary Ross’s screenplay is good message stuff, put over with the courage and conviction it needs. Acting and handling are impeccable throughout. The pace gets a mite sedate in the middle as the movie slightly stops moving, but the film ends strongly and very satisfyingly.

A clever, admirable, upmarket attempt at something different, with any smart-ass comedy or silly comedians to make it ‘palatable’. It was all filmed in colour, then changed to b&w with the colour allowed to seep through as needed by the story.

The 25-year-old Paul Walker graces the film as Skip Martin.

Gary Ross also wrote Big, Dave, Seabiscuit and The Hunger Games, directing the last two films also. In 2014 he was in preproduction on a remake of East of Eden.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 678

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