Pleasantville

Another Pleasant
Valley Fun Day

Pleasantville
USA 1998 Directed by Gary Ross
New Line Cinema Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Spoilers Rave On.

Wow.

Where to begin with such a complex and brilliant film?

I saw Pleasantville when it first hit cinemas back in 1998 and was instantly bowled over by it. Then, it was a major movie for me at the dawn of the DVD era and a very early purchase for me on that format. It was a ‘go to’ film for me for a fair few years... I watched it often at the tail end of the 1990s and very early 2000s. Then I just kind of forgot about it until very recently when an expanded re-release of the amazing score to the film came out. So I imported a Blu Ray copy over form the US (Why the heck is an important film like this not on UK Blu Ray?) because, well, with the way colour and monochrome are treated in this film... it made it an easy, no brainer of a candidate for an upgrade. Although, well, I hadn’t seen it in at least two decades so I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t have one of those experiences where a much loved film of yesteryear went on to disappoint me when I revisited. I needn’t have worried... Pleasantville is as much of an all time classic now as when it was first released and I find it amazing that this film has such a low key reputation these days. It deserves to be rediscovered and reappraised as the sheer masterpiece it is... and soon.

Okay, there’s lots going on in the film but the basic premise is this... teenager David, played by Tobey Maguire, is a fan of an old black and white TV sitcom called Pleasantville, to the point he is going to go in for the cash prize quiz during the TV Pleasantville Marathon at the weekend. Meanwhile, his sister Jennifer, played by Reese Witherspoon, has invited her dream date over to watch a concert at the same time the marathon starts on TV. Brother and sister fight over control of the remote, which smashes. But, as if by magic (and accompanied by peels of sinister thunder), Don Knotts arrives playing a TV repairman who, after quizzing David about his knowledge of Pleasantville, leaves them a brand new, strange looking remote with ‘a little more oomph’.

The Pleasantville Marathon begins and while the son and daughter of the perfect 1950s sitcom family, Bud and Mary Sue, are fighting over a radio set, David and Jennifer are once again struggling with the remote in the same way, parallelling the action on the TV screen. And then the wrong... or right... button is pressed and, hey presto, they are both transported into the world of Pleasantville in 1958, replacing Bud and Mary Sue, wondering what the heck they are doing there and with Jennifer bemoaning the fact that she is now in ‘pasty’ black and white.

Their sit-com mother and father are played by Anne Archer and William H. Macy and the guy who runs the local diner is played by Jeff Daniels.  And as they live out their life in this perfect TV 1950s world... where the Geography teacher teaches classes about the only geography the residents know (consisting of two roads), everybody on the school team scores a basket at basketball (no matter where they throw it, it will always wind up in the hoop), the fire brigade knows only how to deal with cats in trees and wives stay home dutifully and prepare dinner for their working husbands... they, subtly at first, begin to inadvertently (at first) change and challenge the values of the inhabitants of the town, which slowly transforms objects and then people into full-on technicolour, in contrast to and amidst the monochromatic existence of the other residents.

So sex is introduced to the teenagers. Jeff Daniels’ character goes from not being able to make a cheeseburger himself because of the order of the routine changing when Bud is late at his part-time job at the diner, to becoming a painter (with real colours) while falling in love and having an affair with Ann Archer (who accidentally causes a tree to burst into flames as an instance of the world of Pleasantville reacting physically to her sexual discovery when she masturbates in the bath tub for the first time) and so on and so forth.

So its a film about social change and sexual revolution and the way a society deals with that. There’s an apple in Eden metaphor and a point where the black and white characters start rioting, burning books (which always used ot be blank until the pages started filling in by themselves) in an allegory of the Nazi regime and putting up signs in windows like ‘No Coloureds’... which means in the context of the film, no people who arent in black and white but is obviously a call back to the real signs put up in places in the USA in the fifties as a racial barrier (and I suspect some states in America probably still use them). 

When the owner of the diner paints a portrait of Joan Allen naked in the window and then later he creates, with ‘Bud’, a mural depicting the changes in society in Pleasantville, the two of them are put on trial. A trial which concludes with... oh heck, I’m not going to tell you everything because it’s a film which needs to be seen. A pure classic of 90’s cinema and one of the best films (if not the best) of that decade.

The acting in this is absolutely superb from everybody. You have brilliant performances from Maguire and Witherspoon who do some amazing things with just facial expressions and reactions to carry a lot of the weight of the changes going on around them. Meanwhile, you have William H. Macey having to limit his performance throughout a lot of the film to the way a character in a 1950s sitcom would behave... and coming a cropper (like Daniels) when his routine/scripted life has a spanner thrown into it. “Where’s my dinner?” he constantly asks of the void.

And then again you’ve got characters like those played by Daniels and Archer, who go through changes and transform from those same 50s sit-com ciphers to people learning to question and change their expectations of life and grow from it. It’s a real tightrope of performances brought together and, somehow, it all works. And a special shout out is required, I think, for Tobey Maguire’s love interest, played by Marley Shelton, who is absolutely glowing in this.

And the film itself is put together in an equally clever way too. Two things which stick in my mind are as follows...

One, as the town and people in it start to change, the music (asides from Randy Newman’s absolutely pitch perfect and beautiful score) begins to echo the kinds of changes they are gong through. Starting with the kids beginning to break out with rock n’ roll and then progressing into jazz. This is no better presented as when the local teenagers are consulting with Bud (who has somehow become their inadvertent figure head) about the world ‘outside’ the parameters of Pleasantville, which is all set to Dave Brubeck’s great jazz piece Take Five. I’m guessing the director chose this because it’s written in a less simplistic 5/4 rhythm. It’s a superb scene though, with the percussion beats echoing the volatile questions Bud is being asked, like little gut punches musically expressed.  

And the other thing is the opening scene which establishes Maguire’s character. In a film about the way change is wrought and perceived (and reacted against), the director experiments, following a montage sequence advertising the ‘Pleasantville Marathon’ on TV, with the semiotics of cinema. Now, visual language is generally something that most people don’t consciously realise they have quite a sophisticated command of. Pioneered, consciously or otherwise, by people like Georges Méliès, The Lumiere Brothers and D. W. Griffith at the dawn of cinema, a visual cinematic language soon evolved and this is something that any person, as soon as they start watching TV in their infancy, teaches themself how to decode... often without even realising it. And the director uses that same visual language here to quickly pull the rug from the audience and upend what they thought they were watching.

So let me just talk about two basic concepts... the establishing shot and the one/two/one/two sequence making up a conversation. So an establishing shot is usually a single shot or series of shots of a location so you can establish in your mind where the following scene is playing out. In a seventies TV show, for example, you might see a shot of a building in a street and then you might see another shot of a close up of a window on the building (or it might just dolly in or zoom to that window within the same shot) to establish that the next scene you see is taking place inside the room where that window is.

And the other sequence of shots I mentioned, a conversation between two people, is very quickly rendered by a close up or medium shot of one person speaking a line facing a camera, then a shot of another person either speaking to camera or reacting to those words, then back to the first person for the next line or reaction, then back to the other person etc... and the viewer instinctively, through early experiences with the visual language of film, immediately puts this together in their head as two sides of a conversation.

Where Ross is brilliant here is in the school yard where we first have a shot of Tobey Maguire talking to a girl he obviously has a crush on and is trying to ask out. He says something, then we cut to her reacting, then we cut back to him saying the next line, then back to her reacting... and so on for 30 seconds to a minute. And then, when you’ve got the message that it’s two sides of a conversation, the director cuts to an overview, establishing shot revealing that Maguire is standing in another part of the yard completely, talking to the air in an imaginary conversation with her, while her reaction shots were directed to a boy she was talking to just across from where he stands, alone... and it totally changes what you thought you were watching, disorienting the viewer for a second and setting up the mission statement, if you like, that this is a film which plays with metatextual ideas but not just in terms of what the characters in the film are perceiving.... but also in regards to the audience. The final shot of the film also does a similar kind of thing but in a different way.

And that’s me done, I think, with my thoughts on Pleasantville. It’s one of the true masterpieces of American cinema as far as I’m concerned and I’m amazed that more people haven’t cottoned onto it over the years. An intelligent film with an agenda of promoting self awareness, individuality and progression through change. As represented by sexuality, literature, music and art. If you are a friend of cinema and you’ve not seen this classic then you might want to do yourself a favour and rectify that real quick. One of the all time greats.