Pleasantville
USA 1998
Reviewed by Andrew O'Hehir
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
The USA, the present. Teenage brother and sister David and Jennifer are transported by a mysterious television repairman into the fictional world of David's favourite show, a black-and-white 50s sitcom called Pleasantville, where they become Bud and Mary Sue Parker, children of the show's central family. David/Bud suggests they play along with Pleasantville's universe - where sex is unknown, the basketball team never loses, and all the library books are blank - until he can make contact with the repairman again. But Jennifer/Mary Sue refuses. Instead she seduces Skip, the captain of the basketball team. Pleasantville's universe becomes unstable - the basketball team loses, books fill with words and the like.
As carnal knowledge - along with literature, art and geography - begins to spread, certain objects and people in Pleasantville begin to bloom into colour. Betty, Bud and Mary Sue's mother, becomes "coloured" and leaves home to live with Bill Johnson, the diner owner who has taken up modernist painting, while their father George remains in black and white. Mobs of enraged black-and-white citizens destroy Bill's diner and attack "coloureds" in the street until Big Bob, the town's mayor, decrees a restrictive code of conduct aimed at stopping the spread of colour. But David/Bud and Bill paint a mural on the police station, leading to a court case that ends with David/Bud turning the whole town coloured. Jennifer decides she will stay behind in Pleasantville as Mary Sue to pursue her new-found interest in literature, while David uses the repairman's magic remote control to return to his divorced mother in the present day.
Review
It is rare that one can criticise a big-budget Hollywood movie for having too many ideas, and by that standard alone Gary Ross' Pleasantville is a signal event. Ross - whose penchant for outsized fantasy was made clear in his screenplays for Big and Dave - tries to pack his directorial debut with everything from Milton and Blake to The Wizard of Oz (1939) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), ending up with a muddled liberal fairytale about freedom and tolerance in the Frank Capra tradition. That's nothing to be ashamed of, especially when Pleasantville also emulates the visual lustre and genuine, big-hearted sentimentality of Capra's best work. Unlike The Truman Show, with which it will inevitably be compared, Pleasantville's ideas are visual and cinematic as well as theoretical, making it gloriously enjoyable entertainment without Truman's slight but unmistakable aroma of postmodern pedantry.
Sympathetic portrayals of high-school geek losers are endemic in American movies (the popular-jock caste having produced few film-makers, it seems). Even so, Tobey Maguire's performance as David, suddenly transported to a world he understands better than he does his own life, is an exceptionally nuanced one. Wearing the same wry, wounded, older-than-his-years expression he employed so well in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, Maguire gives us a lonely young man who wants nothing more than to succeed in the real world. Mastering the minutiae of the Pleasantville series is an enthusiasm and an escape, but David doesn't want to live in the show any more than his randy sister does. In fact, it is the wilfully trampy Jennifer (played with the requisite sauciness by Reese Witherspoon) who is responsible for the greater act of imagination. In refusing to restrain her own desires - in order to collaborate with the Pleasantville ethos - she liberates the town into all the chaos and disorder of sensuality.
From a genial spoof of the Fall, featuring Don Knotts' geriatric television repairman as a misguided Jehovah and the unchanging world of a televisual small town as Paradise, Pleasantville careens through a dizzying range of cultural, historical and mythic references. When sitcom mom Betty Parker (whose balance of parody and pathos is affectingly captured by Joan Allen) experiences her sexual awakening, the film seems redolent of The Scarlet Letter, or perhaps A Doll's House. When Big Bob and his band of angry 'black-and-white' men in bowling shirts ban rock 'n' roll and coloured paint, it briefly becomes Rebel without a Cause. When it seeks to evoke both Kristallnacht and the Jim Crow South simultaneously, it overreaches itself.
Like The Wizard of Oz, whose structure it parallels closely, Pleasantville overcomes its moralising and occasional pomposity with magical photographic effects (the scene in which pink cherry blossoms fall on the black-and-white road to Lovers' Lane will linger in viewers' memories for years); moments of dry humour, as when television dad George Parker (the hilariously deadpan William H. Macy) admits to David/Bud that he has eaten nothing but cocktail olives since Betty's departure, as he understands neither the freezer nor the stove; and commanding central performances. In place of Judy Garland's irrepressible Depression lass, Ross and Maguire offer a rueful 90s boy-Adam who learns what he already knew: perfect systems always decay, so human beings have no option but to choose uncertainty. It's not quite that there's no place like home - in the end, even in Pleasantville, there's no place but home.
Credits
- Producers
- Jon Kilik
- Robert J. Degus
- Steven Soderbergh
- Gary Ross
- Screenplay
- Gary Ross
- Director of Photography
- John Lindley
- Editor
- William Goldenberg
- Production Designer
- Jeannine Oppewall
- Music
- Randy Newman
- ©New Line Productions, Inc
- Production Companies
- New Line Cinema presents a Larger Than Life production
- Executive Producers
- Michael De Luca
- Mary Parent
- Co-producers
- Allen Alsobrook
- Allison Thomas
- Edward Lynn
- Andy Borowitz
- Susan Borowitz
- Associate Producer
- Robin Bissell
- Executive in Charge of Production
- Carla Fry
- Production Controller
- Paul Prokop
- Production Co-ordinators
- Diana Zock
- In-house:
- Emily Glatter
- Unit Production Manager
- Allen Alsobrook
- Location Managers
- Ken Lavet
- Diane Friedman
- Post-production
- Executive in Charge of:
- Jody Levin
- Supervisor:
- Ric Keeley
- Co-ordinator:
- Jay Vinitsky
- Assistant Directors
- Yudi Bennett
- Jonathan McGarry
- Nancy Townsend
- Script Supervisor
- Barbara Tuss
- Casting
- Ellen Lewis
- Debra Zane
- Voice:
- Barbara Harris
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography
- Rob Sweeney
- Camera Operators
- Ken Ferris
- Henry Cline
- Lawrence Karman
- Additional Camera:
- Amy Vincent
- Malcolm M. Brown
- Steadicam Operators
- Additional Camera:
- David Emmerichs
- Donald E. Thorin Jr
- Visual Effects
- Supervisor:
- Chris Watts
- Editor:
- Logan Breit
- Colour Effects Designer
- Michael Southard
- Visual Effects/Digital Colour
- Pleasantville Visual Effects
- Visual Effects Producer:
- Estee Chandler
- Chief Scientist/Software Development:
- Raymond Yeung
- Facility Manager:
- Lauralee Wiseman
- Senior Digital Compositor:
- Ron Kallesen
- Digital Colour Correction:
- Ozzie Carmona
- Senior Digital Colour Artists:
- Hugo Dominguez
- Janet Freedland
- Timothy Keller
- Digital Colour Artists:
- Karel Beck
- Glenn Clyatt
- Jerry Clyatt
- Dawn Gates
- Mark Hopper
- Marvin Jones
- Video Colour Artist:
- Vicki Collins
- Dustbuster:
- Marc G. Nanjo
- Rotoscope Artists:
- James Valentine
- Lisa Kshatriya
- Data I/O Supervisor:
- Sean Callan
- Digital Colour Production Managers:
- Susan Fuller
- Jennifer Weinberg
- Visual Effects Co-ordinator:
- Bronwyn Waddington
- Visual Effects Consultant:
- Janek Sirrs
- Colour Effects Software Consultant:
- Stanton Rutledge
- Digital Scanning/Recording
- Cinesite Digital Imaging
- SPIRIT DataCine Colourist:
- Richard Cassel
- DataCine I/O Operator:
- Jackson Yu
- Scanning/Recording Producer:
- Angela Angove
- Scanning Co-ordinator:
- Bruce Bullock
- Recording Co-ordinator:
- Sly West
- DataCine Engineer:
- Mark Girard
- Recording Engineer:
- Dale Caughey
- Lightning Recorder Operators:
- George Callins
- Alain Germain
- Jason Adams
- Glen Gustufson
- Floyd Burks
- Jason Dost
- Carl Jacobson
- Lightning Recorder Supervisor:
- Kevin Schwab
- Digital Imaging Supervisor:
- Bob Fernley
- Digital Effects Editor:
- Shawn Broes
- Additional Visual Effects
- Cinesite Digital Studios
- Digital Effects Supervisor:
- Tom Smith
- Digital Effects Producer:
- Jessica Trento
- Digital Paint Supervisor:
- Corinne Pooler
- Rotoscope Supervisor:
- Karen Klein
- Digital Artists:
- Joe Dubs
- Susana Slaughter
- Andrew Goldstein
- Mike Frevert
- Julius Magodo
- Tim Gibbons
- Mark Lewis
- Dan Levitan
- Gilbert Gonzalez
- Erin M. Cullen
- George Edwin Oliver Jr
- Executive Producer:
- Gil Gagnon
- Additional Visual Effects/Digital Colour
- Computer Film Company
- Producer:
- Janet Yale
- Digital Effects Artists:
- Travis Baumann
- Stella Bogh
- Matt Dessero
- Susan Evans
- Dave Fuhrer
- Fortunato Fratassio
- Technical Director:
- Carl Loeffler
- Visual Effects Editor:
- Matt '45' Magnolia
- Data I/O Operators:
- Jenny Behnke
- Nicolle Cornute
- Nicolle Gray
- Tomme Stanley
- John Watson
- Digital Matte Paintings
- Compound Eye
- Mark Sullivan
- Video Services
- Editel Hollywood
- Digital Compositor:
- Mark Robben
- Inferno Artists:
- Bill Coffen
- Max Harris
- Don Lee
- Previsualization Compositor:
- Wayne Shepherd
- Director of Graphics:
- Melissa Hagman
- Visual Effects Producer:
- Janette Shew
- General Manager:
- Barbara Rider
- President:
- Al Walton
- Additional Film Recording
- EFilm
- Producer:
- Carrie Holecek
- Senior Producer:
- David Hays
- Editors:
- Christine Lojko Haslett
- Christopher DeAngelis
- Digital Colour Correction:
- Bruce Halstead
- Technical Director:
- Dave St. Clair
- Data Manager:
- Thomas Mathai
- Digital Effects Laboratory
- Hollywood Film & Video
- President:
- Alex Moradian
- Colour Timer:
- Lola Feiner
- Film Technician:
- Wally Shidler
- Elements for Pleasantville Marathon
- Planet Blue
- Digital Compositing Artist:
- Nathan McGuiness
- Producer:
- Milt Alvarez
- Special Effects
- Co-ordinator:
- Eric Rylander
- Key:
- Michael Gaspar
- Technicians:
- Curtis T. Allen Jr
- Philip D. Bartko
- Noel Butcher
- Jeff Bresin
- Gary P. D'Amico
- Michael K. Duenas
- Dan Gaspar
- Erin Hennessey
- David Jackson
- Tom Knott
- Gregory Lawderer
- Lee Alan McConnell
- Bruce Minkus
- Christine Onesky
- Louis A. Perez
- Anthony Salvaggio
- Clark Templeman
- Tim Walkey
- George M. Zamora
- Gary Zink
- Associate Editor
- Robert Komatsu
- Supervising Art Director
- Bill Arnold
- Art Director
- Dianne Wager
- Set Designers
- Mindi Toback
- Mark Poll
- Randy Wilkins
- Dawn Snyder
- Julia K. Levine
- Set Decorator
- Jay Hart
- Police Station Wall Mural
- Frank Romero
- Mr Johnson's Paintings of Betty
- Carolyn Fox
- Cubist Santa Claus
- Marion Elliot-Westall
- David Dies
- Illustrators
- Jack Johnson
- Carl Aldana
- Jim Bandsuh
- Storyboard Artist
- Len Morganti
- Costume Designer
- Judianna Makovsky
- Costume Supervisor
- Eric Sandberg
- Key Make-up Artist
- Susan A. Cabral
- Make-up Consultant
- Richard Dean
- Key Hairstylist
- Carolyn L. Elias
- Main Title Sequence
- Hippie Boy
- Orchestrations
- Don Davis
- Music Supervisor
- Bonnie Greenberg
- Music Executive
- Dana Sano
- Music Business Affairs Executive
- Lori Silfen
- Music Co-ordinator
- Lisa Brown
- Music Editors
- Chris Brooks
- Bruno Coon
- Jim Flamberg
- Music Scoring Mixer
- Dennis Sands
- Soundtrack
- "Across the Universe" by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, performed by Fiona Apple; "Cachita" by Rafael Hernandez Marin, Bernardo Sancristobal, performed by Esquivel; "My Blue Heaven" by Walter Donaldson, George Whiting, performed by Esquivel; "Donna Reed Show Theme" by John Seely, William Loose; "The Waste Land" by Robin Bissell, Jinsoo, performed by Diamond Slim; "Destiny" by Lordikim Allah, Brendan Brown, Ali Theodore, performed by Mister Jones, contains a sample of "Change the Beat" performed by B-side; "Dream Girl" by Johnny Mitchell, Robert Carr, performed by Robert & Johnny; "The Gang That Sang Heart of My Heart" by Ben Ryan, performed by the Four Aces; "Mr. Blue" by DeWayne Blackwell, performed by Pat Boone; "Sparkle of Love" by Robin Bissell, performed by Bissell, Bourgeois and Coon; "Be-Bop-A-Lula" by Gene Vincent, Tex Davis, performed by Gene Vincent; "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" by Lloyd Price, performed by Larry Williams; "Sixty Thousand Clams" by Bruno Coon, performed by Talkback; "Take Five" by Paul Desmond, performed by Dave Brubeck Quartet; "So What" by/performed by Miles Davis;
- "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear" by Kal Mann, Bernie Lowe, performed by Elvis Presley; "At Last" by Mack Gordon, Harry Warren, performed by Etta James; "Rave On" by Norman Petty, Bill Tilghman, Sunny West, performed by Buddy Holly
- Sound Design
- Lance Brown
- Sound Mixer
- Robert Anderson Jr
- Re-recording Mixers
- Gary Bourgeois
- Gary Alexander
- Re-recordist
- Alison Sanford
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Bruce Stambler
- Sound Editors
- Jay Nierenberg
- Steve Nelson
- Glenn Hoskinson
- Kim Secrist
- Gary Blufer
- Dialogue Editors
- Bernard Weiser
- Robert Troy
- Virginia Cook McGowan
- Donald L. Warner Jr
- Anthony R. Milch
- Marshall Winn
- Aaron Weisblatt
- ADR
- Supervising Editor:
- Joe Mayer
- Foley
- Supervising Editor:
- Michael Dressel
- Editors:
- Scott Curtis
- Shawn Sykora
- Risk Management Consultant
- Andrew Matthews
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Ernie Orsatti
- Animal Trainers
- Kathleen Clements
- Lara Deakin
- Mark A. Echevarria
- Thomas L. Gunderson
- Gary Mui
- Cast
- Tobey Maguire
- David, 'Bud Parker'
- Jeff Daniels
- Bill Johnson
- Joan Allen
- Betty Parker
- William H. Macy
- George Parker
- J.T. Walsh
- Big Bob
- Don Knotts
- TV repair man
- Marley Shelton
- Margaret
- Jane Kaczmarek
- David and Jennifer's mom
- Reese Witherspoon
- Jennifer, 'Mary Sue Parker'
- Natalie Ramsey
- Mary Sue
- Kevin Connors
- Bud
- Heather McGill
- girl in school yard
- Paul Morgan Stetler
- college counsellor
- Denise Dowse
- health teacher
- McNally Sagal
- science teacher
- Giuseppe Andrews
- Howard
- Marissa Ribisi
- Kimmy
- Jenny Lewis
- Christin
- Justin Nimmo
- Mark
- Kai Lennox
- Jason Behr
- Mark's lackeys
- Robin Bissell
- commercial announcer
- Harry Singleton
- Mr Simpson
- John Ganun
- fireman 1
- Paul Walker
- Skip Martin
- Dawn Cody
- Betty Jean
- Maggie Lawson
- Lisa Anne
- Andrea Taylor
- Peggy Jane
- Lela Ivey
- Miss Peters
- Jim Patric
- Tommy
- Marc Blucas
- basketball hero
- Stanton Rutledge
- coach
- Jason Maves
- paper boy
- Gerald Emmerick
- TV weatherman
- Charles C. Stevenson Jr
- Doctor Henderson
- Nancy Lenehan
- Marge Jenkins
- Weston Blakesley
- Gus
- Patrick T. O'Brien
- Roy
- Jim Antonio
- Ralph
- Danny Strong
- juke box boy
- Kristin Rudrüd
- Mary
- Laura Carney
- bridge club lady
- Dan Gillies
- fireman 2
- Erik MacArthur
- Will
- Adam Carter
- boy in soda shop
- David Tom
- Whitey
- Johnny Moran
- Pete
- Jeanine Jackson
- woman
- J. Patrick Lawlor
- thug
- James Keane
- Police Chief Dan
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Entertainment Film Distributors Ltd
- 11,189 feet
- 124 minutes 20 seconds
- Dolby digital/Digital DTS sound/SDDS
- Colour by
- DeLuxe