In a way, the 1950's sitcom was a two-headed creature. On the one hand, it gave us some rather tame entertainment centered on some idealized America, presenting rather pleasant families: the Nelsons, the Cleavers, the Andersons, nice people, all of them, living simple simple lives in a world that was just-so: dad going to work, mom staying home and cooking, the kids never doing much more than pulling some mildly amusing high-jinx. On the other hand, there was almost an evangelical quality to them, and they became a kind of mid-twentieth Century parable reinforcing the gospel of good old-fashioned values— work hard, obey your parents, trust your parents to know what's right, tell the truth. Then everyone would have a glass of milk and a home-baked cookie, a kind of middle-American communion, I guess.
I bring up the two facets of the sitcom, because it provides a helpful model toward understanding just where Gary Ross' Pleasantville succeeds, and just where it falls short. It succeeds when it's giving us a parody of the form— a brilliantly calculated parody, I hasten to say— and when it's exploring just what the sitcom means as a mirror for life outside of TV Land. But he can't leave well enough alone, and at the end, in an attempt to tie everything up in a neat and palatable package, the film becomes just as preachy as Ward lecturing the Beav on why losing his hammer was not the sin, lying about it was.
Pleasantville centers on a brother, David (Tobey Maguire) and sister, Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), who live in a rather unpleasant world. Their parents are divorced, their mother is about to run off to Mexico with her boyfriend, and all of their school lessons center on late-twentieth century problems, the spread of HIV, global warming, famine. To escape, David is obsessed with reruns of a 1950s sitcom, "Pleasantville," and one night, after a mysterious TV repairman (Don Knotts) visits them, David and Jennifer are transported into the series, where they become the children of the principle family in the show, Bud and Mary Sue Parker. There, in a black-and-white world, the two start to turn things upside down, introducing sex, and the concept of free will; slowly, bits and pieces of the world, and eventually characters, turn to color.
Once brother and sister are in the series, the film becomes a right-on parody. Their TV mom, Betty (Joan Allen), never seems to leave the kitchen, except to serve snacks and drinks to her family, their TV father, George (William H. Macey), comes home from work every night at the same time, and says the same words, "Honey I'm home," and "What's for dinner." At school, all the lessons are about Pleasantville, because nothing exists outside it; geography class, for example, centers only on Main and Elm streets, because that's all there is. At basketball practice, all the shots swish through the nets without fail, and at lover's lane, a boy and girl who are going steady sit at arm's length from each other, holding hands— never mind kissing, never mind sex.
It's when he's exploring the sitcom in this way that Ross does his best work. In one scene, for example, all the fathers on Elm Street come home at exactly the same time, marching in almost lock-step past identical houses with identical picket fences, carrying identical briefcases, saluting one another with identical gestures, a finger touched smartly to their identical felt hats. In another place, on his first day in Pleasantville, the new Bud is late for work at the soda shop, and when he arrives, the owner, Mr. Johnson (masterfully portrayed by Jeff Daniels), is at a loss. He's been standing in one place for hours, polishing one spot on the counter until he's worn through the formica finish. "I didn't know what to do," he says. "You know how every day, when you come in, I'm polishing the counter here, and then you put out the napkins and I make the french fries? When you weren't here, I didn't know what to do."
Beyond the parody, Ross's film is also an effective and sometimes moving portrait of a darker side of sitcom perfection. For example, Betty comes to see that she has no identity other than as Wife and Mother and that her pleasant life masked a destructive rigidity. In one of the film's most touching scenes, Betty's discovery of herself as an individual has changed her from black-and-white into color. With her husband in the living room yelling for her to bring snacks for him and guest, she stands frozen in fear in the kitchen, weeping because she's ashamed of her change, until Bud tenderly covers her face and hands with gray makeup and she appears normal again, and she can pretend a cheeriness when she serves her husband.
Near the climax, however, Ross seems to not know how to finish, because Pleasantville takes a sharp turn, and becomes a cinematic political tract. As characters begin to change color, the black-and-white characters become prejudiced against "the coloreds." Stores put up signs saying, "No coloreds served," and the city council, led by a George Wallace-esque mayor (J.T. Walsh), passes ordinances banning color, among other expressions of freedom of choice. The message is obvious, but the film doesn't stop there, as, at one point, Bud makes an impassioned speech at a hearing in city hall, preaching on The Value of Difference. Ross may have a point, but it seems as if he's lost faith in his audience to understand the film's meaning, and so he lectures them on it, just as Ward Cleaver would give a stern but loving talk to Wally and the Beav at the end of an episode.
All this is too bad, because until it takes this wrong turn, Pleasantville was on its way to being a truly great film.
by Joe Schuster
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