Shading the Past

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ah, the '50s! A decade of picket fences and placid smiles, of front lawns without weeds and a future without care, when children were wise enough to respect their parents--because Father knew best.

Rotten, wasn't it? People did what they were supposed to do, not what they deeply, truly needed to. It was a time of confinement: those wire bras were a chastity belt for bosoms. Haircuts were part of the hypocrisy--boys couldn't hide their ears, but they could, had to, suppress their liveliest instincts. It was the long night of the living dead.

That's the not-so-hidden agenda of Pleasantville, an epic-size, largely entertaining parable of repression and awakening from writer-director Gary Ross. The movie imagines that two teenagers, David (Tobey Maguire) and his randy sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), are magically transported from the '90s into the small, sleepy town of David's favorite '50s sitcom. The "knows-best" father, George (William H. Macy), and his wife Betty (Joan Allen), all starched sweetness, are convinced that David is Bud, a.k.a. Sport, and that Jennifer, now outfitted in a poodle-skirt-and-sweater set, is Mary Sue--Muffin to her doting dad. Weirdest of all, the whole town is in black-and-white. "We're supposed to be at home, David," Jennifer scolds her brother. "We're supposed to be in color."

In outline, Pleasantville sounds like the most derivative movie of all time: a bit of Back to the Future (teen time travel), a whit of The Wizard of Oz (the color of dreams), a plot from The Purple Rose of Cairo (with actor Jeff Daniels linking two stories of real and reel life), a lot from The Truman Show (except that here everyone in town believes in the grand fiction of a perfectly ordered society). But Ross, who helped create two other fantasies of displacement, Big and Dave, has more in mind: Follow your heart, not the rules. And '50s bad, '60s good.

Be it known that whatever its message, the movie bubbles over with felicities. The actors, once they get over their early overplaying, are uniformly splendid. Ross gets plenty of smart fun from the collision of '50s and '90s: a "healthy" breakfast loaded with pork products, a mother-daughter sex talk in which Muffin explains the facts of life to Mom. Carpeting the film is Randy Newman's richest score, tremulous and true to the period; those yearning violins express an ache the Pleasantvillagers don't yet know they have.

This Pleasantville, this Bedford Falls, this Brigadoon, this Springfield, you see, is really Stepford--a place so sanitized there are no toilets or double beds, a people so insular they have never known what it's like to feel unprogrammed joy or lust or rage or bravery or intellectual adventure. When they finally open themselves to these emotions (by gazing at a Picasso or hearing Buddy Holly or spending the evening with a naughty girl from the '90s), the people of Pleasantville literally blush into color. They wear their passion on their shamed, fervent faces, on their clothes, like a scarlet letter. And the town burghers, still cocooned in monochrome propriety, are perplexed, vexed, vengeful.

Ross and his team make brilliant use of color technology; the blossoming of each character really does touch the emotions of an openhearted viewer. But the scheme has heavier undertones. For creamy black-and-white read white: white bread, pasty white skin, whites-only neighborhoods, the last decade of white-male culture and, yes, the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan. For color read colored, as in "colored people" and other oppressed minorities--artists seeking free expression, women in search of the apocalyptic orgasm.

The movie sees this emotional colorizing as a good thing. Waking from the prolonged childhood of the '50s (when Ike was the omnipotent dad), America attended to the culture bubbling under its consciousness--to rhythm and blues, to Lenny Bruce and Redd Foxx, to Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover--and took a heroic leap into the enthralling unknown, the flourishing of art, the liberation of race and gender. Yet it can also be argued that the opening of those emotional pores brought a more debased culture: drug epidemics, teen pregnancy, splatter movies, penis-size jokes on every sitcom, Marilyn Manson and Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps the four-letterization of America was not an unalloyed blessing, and the handing of artistic freedom to an infantile culture was not a wise gift.

These views are open to debate--a debate the film doesn't acknowledge. The ultimate irony of Pleasantville is that it is less a '60s movie than a '50s one; it has the didacticism and sentimentality of the serious Hollywood product of that earlier time. That one and this. Stretching credulity but never hedging a bet, Ross wants universal acceptance for his film, so he finally makes the town so endearing that one of the '90s kids decides to stay there. (Gee, wait till Mom finds out!) He hopes you will too. That's the difference between today's best Hollywood filmmakers and the top independent auteurs. Todd Solondz and Hal Hartley don't care if you like, or even get, Happiness or Henry Fool. Ross wants to point a finger while you shake his hand.