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Imagine a world where everything is black and white, where women know their “place” and kids are well-behaved. This same world, though, is one where ignorance of reality is bliss and stifling conformity is the rule. Such an exercise might be a real stretch of the imagination for the broad-minded population of Hillsdale College, so luckily someone captured the environment on the big screen in the 1998 movie Pleasantville.
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This film directed by Gary Ross (Dave) concerns two 1990s teens – Tobey MacGuire of Spiderman fame and Reese Witherspoon of bearing Ryan Phillippe’s children fame. The two are somehow whisked into a “Leave it to Beaver”-like sitcom entitled, you guessed it, “Pleasantville.”
Though this maneuver is somewhat contrived, it does allow for an excellent opportunity to explore what it means to be human as the modern teens wreak havoc upon the unthinking conformity of this black and white world. As the townspeople begin to shake off their uniformity, they also begin to transform from shades of gray into full-blown color.
The sitcom parents, played by William Macy (Fargo) and Joan Allen (Nixon), provide well-developed windows on the differing reactions of the townspeople. The father tries to conserve the world as it is while the mother discovers carnality and literally becomes a colorful rebel.
Pleasantville is, above all else, an allegory. While the situation the film proposes is quite fantastic, it does meet the test proposed by William Dean Howells for art in that it can affirmatively answer the question, “Is it true? – true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women?” The characters in the film discover the full range of what it means to be human and thus not everything they do is either moral or right.
One should not, however, condemn the film for that full embrace. This fallibility is in accordance with the Christian notion of the Fall – humanity is inherently sinful and will make mistakes. It is in a sense what defines our human nature, whether or not we wish to acknowledge such indelicacies in life. Indeed, the movie serves to reveal how attempts to live in denial of that reality constitute a real sickness.
Some viewers may nonetheless object to the way in which the conservative individuals in town react to the changes brought about by the arrival of the once-forbidden knowledge. Their resort to violence may be offensive to those who feel a certain political philosophy is being mocked, but a close examination of history will show that this is not merely a liberal Hollywood caricature of reactionaries.
The civil rights movement (which this movie consciously echoes), for example, provides the historical backdrop for the script. The people of the South reacted violently to having the rotten core of their society exposed to the light, and many of those pushing for change were threatened, physically harmed or even killed by narrow-minded reactionaries desiring to preserve the immoral way of life to which they had grown so accustomed.
Admittedly, the movie does tend to go over the line in a few places, though, and it unfortunately degenerates from witty satire to just plain preachy. The final courtroom scene, for example – where the kids are trying to defend themselves from accusations of subversion – too closely resembles Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in its cornball approach to drama.
The flaws of Pleasantville, however, are far outweighed by the thought-provoking storyline and impressive graphics. This sort of intelligence is all too rare among mainstream Hollywood releases, and definitely deserves viewing.
