Movie review: Pleasantville

I am updating this review, after some months of remembering it. It grows on you. Also a PostScript is added afterwards.

Pleasantville tells the story of two teenagers who are transported into a (black and white) 1958 TV program. In their efforts to get home to the future and reality, they derail the mindless ritual of Pleasantville. In so doing, they discover that things appear coloured, and it is eventually clear that feeling, self-expression and breaking out of the mundane is what causes colour to appear. Considerable conflict arises (black and white husbands do not like it when their dinner is not on the table as usual when they get home, people who generally lose power and react badly to change resist, etc.) and eventually the freedom movement wins out.

There are a lot of nice touches: The appearance of colour objects in a black and white scene; the fact that Pleasantville is toroidal and tiny, so that a geography class consists of mapping main street which goes nowhere; the blank books whose pages magically fill as the intruders tell people about things; the inability of anything to burn (at first), so that the fire department is utterly useless at anything except retrieving cats from trees, etc. One superb scene involves some masturbation causing a tree to burst into flames, and the insurgent boy having to stop yelling "fire" and start yelling "cat", in order to invoke any response, and then showing the fire department how to put out fire.

The theme is clear if not devastating: Freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the need to feel are central to fully enjoying and being yourself. This is portrayed in an amusing, if rather unsubtle, fashion. There are a lot of other minor points buried in there: For example, you see at the end that the present is no better than the 1950s, perhaps the reverse for some people.

There are lots of pieces of culture pulled from our visions of the 1950s, and the movie is scripted cleverly. This is quite the fashion in movies recently: Humour that alludes to our preconceptions or other films or things about the past that nobody would care to remember make good extra facets to hold the viewer's attention.

I rated this film originally as 6/10, well worth a visit on Tightwad Tuesday. Ultimately this is well crafted, but not a deep-seated event. I am inclined to rate it now as 8/10, plot theme, script and innovation being memorable indeed.

PS:

I must disagree with a colleague's review. This review starts with a very incisive description of the scenario, but then rapidly drops into unjustifiable opinion, and, I believe, is occasionally quite wrong.

After the scenario description, Jack says "The trope used to show the transformation from innocence to experience is the change of the characters and their surrounding from monochrome to colour." No, no, no, you have missed it. The colour change corresponds to expressing feelings, not (instantaneously) acquiring (or realising) experience. The importance is in, and a theme of the movie concerns, the act of expression, as contrasted with the tight restraint from showing, opening and acknowledging... a restraint famously a characteristic of the TV programs of the era portrayed. There is a world of difference.
You say that "This is particularly effective" (a phrase that only reminds me of Ford Prefect in HHGTTG trying to tell the Vogon that his afwul poetry is good) "in the case of Mom's self-awakening...". Well, I think the tree bursting spontaneously into flames, before which event nothing in Pleasantville would scorch, let alone burn, took the emphasis off her colourisation. Nevertheless, it was her willingness to enjoy, at the cost of crossing a taboo, that is important.

I think my colleague theorised before he had all the facts, and then tried to fit the end of the movie into the theorised framework. Hence the comment "in other cases, the transformation is too easy or unconvincing", which it would be if you sought experience as the mark. I imagine you thought, making that comment, of the Mayor as judge (in the scene brilliantly using the `black vs. coloured' courtroom scene from To Kill a Mockingbird); in fact, it is the defence gambit that tripped him to acknowledging feelings he would not admit that colourised him, not any gaining of experience!

Now to the conclusion of that paragraph "the last half-hour of the movie is crass, becoming sententious and preachy. This is a shame as David Ross' previous scripts... had demonstrated an ability to end a story." The ending is, given that the climax in the courtroom finishes the excitement, rather neat. It also makes cleanly one of the main points in the theme: that restraint aside, then was no worse than now. (I do not give this end-ploy away for fear of putting off those who hate the cat out of the bag.) I will admit that the movie gets preachy... but then so does To Kill a Mockingbird, and I do not recall feeling it inappropriate then.

"...the movie doesn't quite work and, unlike The Truman Show, doesn't really say much about real people's reaction to strange situations, seeing as in most cases it's about the addition of a third dimension to previously flat characters." No, no, no. The movie does work, save for losing the odd critic with its complexity. The plot may involve the addition of a third dimension to flat characters, but the movie is not "about" that; that is just a vehicle. I mean "real people's reaction to strange situations"?!? Who gives a shit about this? The Pleasantvillians are hardly real (at first), the real people are hardly likely to have meaningful reaction to finding themselves in a fairy story. This is not Superman, where clever filmakers put human feelings in a supernatural creature, and rely on that device to enliven an old fariy story. This is a vehicle for entertainment (via bizarre situation comedy, clever devices, some cunning parody and a little old-TV nostalgia) and for comment on the importance of openness, of personal expression, of a social structure that permits this, and, yes to some extent, the need for experience.

After reading this next (extracted) comment, I thought at first the whole review extreme humour that had sucked me in, but the rest could not possibly be facetious, so I have to address it as a serious comment: "...the movie is even more dangerous... most viewers don't realise ... that they are subjected to a two-hour brainwashing [to convince them that] the conversion of film noir masterpieces into bland colorised versions is acceptable improvement." My English master (and perhaps he was yours too) would have called this `reading a little more into the story than is really there'. He would have been indulging in extreme meiosis. That is eleven words but one will do: Drivel.